WipEout HD

The King of hoversled racing is back… and how! The Wipeout series has had a rough time in recent years but all now all is forgiven. Presented in stunning 1080p High Definition resolution this is by far the prettiest Wipeout to date and what’s more the gameplay isn’t too bad either. Costing only £11.99 from the PSN store it also beats the competition in price too… 

So, what’s the bad news?

Well apart from the stunning HD graphics, this isn’t a “new” game with much of it being made up from elements found in Wipeout Pure and Wipeout Pulse  Online play is lacking somewhat when compared to other races (Grid for example) though it works pretty efficiently and is by no means poor. This is not however a bad game, far from it. The thrill of racing along at ridiculous speeds to a thumping soundtrack in cutting edge HD is what Wipeout was born to do, and boy does it do it well!

There are five race modes in Wipeout HD: Single Race, Time Trial, Speed Lap Tournament, and the visually stunning Zone mode which sees your racer increasing in speed lap by lap until the ship blows up or runs out of energy, Set in a exotic block colour world that changes in cool waves as your speed increases you can’t help wishing you had the option to race all your races in this cool graphic style. Extra fun can be had with the splitscreen mode which provides hours of fun as you race and fight with a friend and photo mode which allows you to take a photo of any craft in a race and tweak the camera angle and a number of visual effects, these images can then be saved to your PS3’s hard drive.

Most of your favourite weapons are back though if I’m honest there’s nothing quite as fun here as Fatal Inertia EX’s grappling rope though unlike that game it’s not impossible to race without getting your fingers dirty, you often have to choose between speed boost or weapons pick up making you play as clean cut racer or down and dirty fighter. As you’d expect the soundtrack features some pretty hot tracks though if not to your taste you can select to play music from your PS3’s hardrive

What we have here is a hoversled racer for the next generation of consoles, it easily wipes the floor with the competition in terms of gameplay, style and price… a great buy if you have a HD tv.