[E3 2009] WipEout HD Fury Pack Hands-On
The bestest anti-grav racer is getting better and we've got the words and video to prove it.
Published: June 5, 2009
WipEout HD was and continues to be one of the most balls-out awesome racing experiences on the PS3 right now. Despite being released almost nine months ago, the game has seen a handful of patches to help smooth out the difficulty (and remove a few pesky bugs that came about as a result of the PSN friends list growing right around the time the game was released), but there haven't been any fundamental changes to what's offered when you download the game until now. The upcoming Fury Pack will add 13 new craft, eight completely new tracks (no more holdovers from the PSP games here) and three new game modes (two of which are online-enabled). As we were heading out of Sony's VIP area of their booth at E3 this year, we saw someone playing what looked like a WipEout-meets-arcade-shooter mode and had to see what was going on.
Turns out this was one of the new modes: Detonator. Simply put, it throws some peanut butter-style first-person shooter mechanics into the sweet, sweet chocolate that was WipEout HD's Zone Mode, and the result is pure, unadulterated digital crack. See, scattered around the track are mines that start out glowing white. Equipped with a machine gun that has unlimited ammo, you're tasked with shooting as many of these mines as possible. The shots from your gun will actually carom around the corners and bounce off walls, and since you need only reload it (doing so manually before the "clip" is spent results in a faster reload than if you'd bled it completely dry), you can fire the guns almost constantly.
That's a good thing, as any mines you don't destroy on the first lap go dark, losing points and becoming another blockade in your path as the ship goes faster and faster around the circuit. Mines caught in the blast radius of a detonation also explode, and are "pushed" forward a bit, creating chains that can help clear the path a little more easily. In this way, Detonator becomes something of a shooter (with constant manual reloading to maximize the down time between shots) that lets you bounce shots around corners to keep up with the faster speed classes. Since accuracy counts as much as tagging the mines, you're graded at the end on how well you actually hit things. To help clear out the track when things get seriously clogged, detonating a mine will send out a shockwave that hits everything down the track for a bit, and of course looks amazing.
Speaking of shockwaves, Eliminator Mode allows you to, for the first time, flip a bitch and reverse direction with a press of the L1 Button, instantly turning races into massive competitive duels. Like Detonator, the infusion of light FPS elements (in this case, a frag limit) keeps things more about shooting the other guys and less about banking laps. As you take out competitors, you'll stock energy that can be released in a massive damaging shockwave to enemies around you. Since there are normal pickups along the way, you can imagine how getting ahead of everyone and then unleashing, say, the rolling shockwave back at everyone behind you can turn what were formerly behind-the-pack weapons into something altogether more useful.
Zone Battle takes the increasing march of speed from the normal Zone Mode and adds an awesome little twist. As you scoot around the track (now shared with other competitors), you'll start stocking energy that builds as a multiplier. This can be banked to restore shields or -- and this is the fun part -- used to instantly catapult yourself forward a few zones. Since the goal here is to be the first to hit a particular zone, there's a risk/reward setup that's unlike anything else WipEout has seen. Do you bank the energy to restore shields or fling yourself up the leaderboard by increasing your zone count? Do you wait until the multiplier lets you can three or four zones, or spend it now to incrementally increase the speed? Like the other two modes, it feels completely new, but piggybacks off the existing gameplay that was already so polished before.
That's easily the most attractive part of the Fury Pack: it's WipEout, but not as you've ever seen it before, and instantly pushes the series forward in ways that would normally be reserved for a full sequel. Given that there's online play and that the game will add new Trophies (it's still the only purely downloadable title that has a Platinum as far as we know), there's enough here to make even those burned out by the re-use of old PSP WipEout tracks take notice. We only played things for about 15 minutes, but we instantly wanted more. Luckily, we'll only have to wait a few more weeks before we hit the rather foggy "Summer" release window.
Turns out this was one of the new modes: Detonator. Simply put, it throws some peanut butter-style first-person shooter mechanics into the sweet, sweet chocolate that was WipEout HD's Zone Mode, and the result is pure, unadulterated digital crack. See, scattered around the track are mines that start out glowing white. Equipped with a machine gun that has unlimited ammo, you're tasked with shooting as many of these mines as possible. The shots from your gun will actually carom around the corners and bounce off walls, and since you need only reload it (doing so manually before the "clip" is spent results in a faster reload than if you'd bled it completely dry), you can fire the guns almost constantly.
That's a good thing, as any mines you don't destroy on the first lap go dark, losing points and becoming another blockade in your path as the ship goes faster and faster around the circuit. Mines caught in the blast radius of a detonation also explode, and are "pushed" forward a bit, creating chains that can help clear the path a little more easily. In this way, Detonator becomes something of a shooter (with constant manual reloading to maximize the down time between shots) that lets you bounce shots around corners to keep up with the faster speed classes. Since accuracy counts as much as tagging the mines, you're graded at the end on how well you actually hit things. To help clear out the track when things get seriously clogged, detonating a mine will send out a shockwave that hits everything down the track for a bit, and of course looks amazing.
Speaking of shockwaves, Eliminator Mode allows you to, for the first time, flip a bitch and reverse direction with a press of the L1 Button, instantly turning races into massive competitive duels. Like Detonator, the infusion of light FPS elements (in this case, a frag limit) keeps things more about shooting the other guys and less about banking laps. As you take out competitors, you'll stock energy that can be released in a massive damaging shockwave to enemies around you. Since there are normal pickups along the way, you can imagine how getting ahead of everyone and then unleashing, say, the rolling shockwave back at everyone behind you can turn what were formerly behind-the-pack weapons into something altogether more useful.
Zone Battle takes the increasing march of speed from the normal Zone Mode and adds an awesome little twist. As you scoot around the track (now shared with other competitors), you'll start stocking energy that builds as a multiplier. This can be banked to restore shields or -- and this is the fun part -- used to instantly catapult yourself forward a few zones. Since the goal here is to be the first to hit a particular zone, there's a risk/reward setup that's unlike anything else WipEout has seen. Do you bank the energy to restore shields or fling yourself up the leaderboard by increasing your zone count? Do you wait until the multiplier lets you can three or four zones, or spend it now to incrementally increase the speed? Like the other two modes, it feels completely new, but piggybacks off the existing gameplay that was already so polished before.
That's easily the most attractive part of the Fury Pack: it's WipEout, but not as you've ever seen it before, and instantly pushes the series forward in ways that would normally be reserved for a full sequel. Given that there's online play and that the game will add new Trophies (it's still the only purely downloadable title that has a Platinum as far as we know), there's enough here to make even those burned out by the re-use of old PSP WipEout tracks take notice. We only played things for about 15 minutes, but we instantly wanted more. Luckily, we'll only have to wait a few more weeks before we hit the rather foggy "Summer" release window.
