Cars
Rainbow Studios finally goes on-road... with mixed results.
Published: June 20, 2006
It sounds a little odd to say this about a Rainbow game, but the appeal and charm of Cars doesn't really come from the racing, however. The animation on the cars and the personality injected into the fantastically lip-synched mouths adds a ton of emotional investment. It's honestly on the level of something that Naughty Dog or Insomniac have done in the past in terms of delivering nuance and subtlety to things like where eyes look or how the "body" parts move while speaking. It's as if Rainbow said "okay, we've done static vehicles for long enough, check this out" and went nuts pouring some real soul into the characters.
And then of course there's the world itself. Static and unflinching though it may be, the art design feels lifted squarely from Pixar's own libraries, and it melds the game to the source material in a way that few licensed games have ever done in the past. The framerate may not be totally solid at times, and to be perfectly honest, the speedometer certainly doesn't match up with how quickly things are zipping by, but the lighting and color palette and expression that went into crafting the game oozes from every frame of video.
Just the difference in tone from the sun-drenched mesas and plateaus of Radiator Springs' far-off vistas put up against the Piston Cup (think NASCAR) stock car races with the stadium-lit track and seas of cars in the stands looking on, flashbulbs darting from packet to packet of steel and chrome, it really shows that the developers took the time to "get" the look of the movie.
The audio shines here too, no doubt one of the pluses that comes with having access to some of the materials that Pixar used for the film. All the vehicles, from stock cars to tow trucks to little Italian putters, all of them have a rasp and throat to the engine that gives them tons of punch. It can't quite hold a candle to the stuff you'll hear in the movie clips (which is a shame), but it's far, far better than even bigger budget racing games afford.
Kudos should also go to the voice over staff, which managed to assemble either an incredibly kick-ass sound-alike voice cast or got the actors from the movie itself to appear (it's never really said in the credits, and since the game does borrow from the movie, all the big-screen actors are listed too). That I was going back and forth on the game until the end says something about the talent -- particularly the actor THQ snagged to reprise Tony Shalhoub's character, who must've done lots of research watching old episodes of Wings.
The only sore spot I had with the audio was the soundtrack, not because there weren't some solid songs (though, like the PSP version of the game, the actual artist tracks are recycled far too often), but because Bruno Coon's fantastic, twangy soundtrack wasn't allowed enough time to shine. It's great stuff, and I eventually killed the nine or so licensed tracks and just went with the instrumental music instead.
It's an odd place to be in; on the one hand, the racing bits, the core gameplay just doesn't feel as solid as it should -- and certainly not on par with Rainbow Studios' other projects -- yet the presentation manages to replicate the charm and looks of the source material so well, that it doesn't feel like a licensed game, it feels like something that was developed alongside the movie in terms of how it matches the big screen product. That doesn't happen enough with licensed games, but what happens far too often is that they end up being poor games. Cars skirts that line, teetering into the realm of being a little too lax on the tight controls that define a Rainbow game while proving that the developer can do more than just make plain bikes and ATVs zip around a track. In the end, the game manages to survive being a bad experience -- but just barely, and there's a good chance that this will be enjoyed far more as a rental than a full purchase, so I'd suggest going for the former before you attempt the latter.
