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Expertly reviewed by LiteMountain, 27th Nov 2005. |
| Review Summary: It has its moments.. no, really, it has! |
Overall Score: 3/5
 
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| Good Points: The graphics has no pop-up AT ALL! The ships are some of the best designed I have ever seen and the tracks are beautiful to behold. The music is also quite nice. |
| Bad Points: The game has a very unstable and low framerate and there are many effects that the game could have gone without like the energy "beam" representing the road, all those particles emitted from the e-beam, the "flow of air" emitted from each and every ship, all those tiny blinking lights that follow the e-beams sides and lots of animated textures on background objects. The controls are not good, much thanks to the e-beams wothlessness. The entire concept of the e-beam, it just limits game-play and adds nothing positive at all. |
Review: I got Jet Ion GP for a good cheap price, so even though it has many bad parts I still think it was worth buying. Let's begin with the bad stuff shall we?
First off, the game suffers from horrible slowdown and choppy framerate. Most of the time the game is still playable though, but just barely.
Second, the controls are not good and you are very limited in your movement thanks to an energy beam that represents the "air road" you fly on. All this e-beam does is limit your movement and help slow down the game with all its extra effects like particles flowing around your ship when you're near it and way to many blinking lights on both sides of the beam means ALOT of extra work for the poor PS2 to hadle constantly.. all this plus lots of highly detailed ships and other useless effects not only makes the game slow and choppy, but also makes it hard to see what you're doing and where you're going! All these things should not exist in a racing game of any kind. Besides these thing though, the rest of the game is actually pretty good..
The game also makes full use of the touch-sensitive PS2 controller, it's just to bad the controls are unresponsive and stiff like old corpses, otherwise that might have been a good thing.. Also you can not use the analog sticks for acceleration, only steering.
Now on to the good stuff!
The ships all look great, highly detailed and cool designs make them all beauties to behold. All ships have two color schemes depending on what polit you chose to race with.
The ships also have cool offensive and defensive items that can be equipped before a race, laser cannons, boosters, shield and more is at your disposal.
The tracks you race on are very beautiful to behold and the fact that there is no pop-up in the graphics at all means you can see the full levels when you are at certain places on the track. The track design is also good and varied, the tracks are not as blunt as the ones in games like Extreme G and WipeOut, much because in this game you actually fly, not just hover or drive on the ground.
One of my favourite tracks is the one going all the way around a mountain, from top to bottom and back up again.
The music is also quite good, nothing really memorable but it fits in with the graphical style of the game I'd say, soft trance and sunny weather actually works rather well together.
The game has good parts and bad parts and I personally think they cancel eachother out almost perfectly. The game could have been alot better but also alot worse, it's balancing on the thin line between good and bad and you can only know for sure what you will think of the game by playing it yourself.
If you find Jet Ion GP for a good price then I'd say it's worth buying, otherwise you should leave it alone. |
Ratings
| Value For Money: |
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3 |
| Review Score: |
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3 |
| Recommended? | |
Yes |
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PC & Video Games