World's Scariest Police Chases

Published by Activision
Playstation
Out Now

You've seen the TV program and now its time to play the game. Cop car chases of the most bizarre await you in this drive 'em up as you must pursue criminals in a high speed chase which usually involves a lot of swerving amongst the oncoming traffic.

If you've played Driver then this game will be instantly recognisable. Control of your vehicle feels identical to the Driver games but visually, WSPC is superior.

The basic idea of the game is to control a police vehicle and attempt to stop the getaway criminals via a high speed car chase. The game deserves full credit as the chases do seem as fast paced and hazardous as the real life ones and they test your console driving ability to the full. The game has around 20 missions but the first four of those are tutorials that test the different skills that you will require throughout the game.

On beginning the tutorials, the problems become apparent. There are no subtitles for the verbal information that is being given out. If you press the start button and access the in game menu you can see the mission objectives which might sound as though it is a good solution, if it were not for the fact that it compresses say 30 seconds of verbal info into one very short sentence. You can only imagine how much info is lost in such a textual description. Matters are made worse when in some missions (particularly one of the tutorial missions) verbal information is given out during the mission and no text appears for it.

Let me give you the following example of the poor text feedback from one of the tutorial missions. The mission begins and you can't hear the introduction/briefing so you look at the mission objectives which state that you must catch the criminals and get the evidence. OK then you begin the chase and verbal message comes over the radio that you can use firearms but this does not appear in text so you don't know that you can use them (if you use firearms without permission you will lose the mission). A short while later the criminals throw the evidence out of the car and you are verbally told to remember the location so you can return to it later, however no subtitles appear. Later in the mission when you have stopped the car you are verbally told to recover the evidence but again no text informs you of this and if you don't collect the evidence then you will fail the mission. This is how the game is all the way through and can't be recommended for the deaf gamers as too little information is textually represented.

Overall Game Rating: 5.8/10 Only for those who like a real challenge.

Quality of text: 3/10 Very poor the abbreviated mission objective information simply isn't good enough.

Graphics: 8/10 Very respectable for the Playstation/PSone.

Interface:7/10 A standard interface that is straight forward to use.

Gameplay: 5/10 Only half what it could be with so much textual information missing. Had a higher quality of subtitling been used the game would been recommended as it is though it will prove frustrating.