We recently were given the privilege of early access to the Blur demo. Blur is an arcadey racer from Bizarre Creations, the studio behind the Project Gotham Racing series. Before playing the game, I had often heard it compared to two of my favorite racing games (Mario Kart and Beetle Adventure Racing), so I was pretty excited going in. Imagine my surprise when I found a game that is way more Burnout than it is Beetle Adventure Racing, and way more Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing than it is Mario Kart.

Blur starts innocuously enough. After finding a game (which does take some time, although I’ll forgive that since it’s just a beta), you’ll dive right into the action. Probably my favorite part of Blur came in the initial 3 seconds of the race. Rather than counting down and screeching off from a dead stop at the start line, Blur has players getting their cars up to top speed before the race even begins. Although this method of starting a race actually caused me to fall behind a few times when I missed the start, I found it to be a great way to keep the pace of the game up (especially after waiting a while to get into a game in the first place).

From this point though, things seemed to drop off drastically. Like in Mario Kart (or any of its clones), there are power-ups distributed throughout the race that you can pick up as you speed along. None of these are especially interesting or even deviate too much from the standard kart racing formula. In fact, the item set is almost exactly the same as that of the recently released Sonic & SEGA All-Star Racing. There is a simple projectile, a homing attack, a shield, a burst attack, a speed boost, a lightning attack, and a healing item. The only really unique one is the healing item, which is only in place to compensate for the other big difference between this game and your standard Mario Kart clone: a life bar.

Blur tries to differentiate itself from the games that inspired it by giving each player’s car a life total. This life is drained by enemy attacks and bad crashes. Instead of attacks simply slowing you down when they hit you, they also drain your life, forcing you to keep a watchful eye on your life gauge. This system is not an entirely bad idea, although it doesn’t work that well in practice since you can see the other racers' life totals. What this means for you is that it is hard to tell what the result of firing a shot at an enemy will actually be. Unlike in Mario Kart where you know that each item will slow down your opponents a given amount of time, I found that in Blur I was constantly hoping that my attacks against opposing cars would be effective.

Since we’re talking about hoping, I figure now is as good a time as any to touch on my biggest problem with this beta: the drifting. Maybe it’s because I love the feel of Mario Kart’s powerslide, maybe it’s because I really dislike having to feather the accelerator around every turn, but I just could not get into the feel of drifting in Blur. The cars all handle so differently that it’s hard to even find one method of turning that works for you. Even from level to level, the same car might actually have different handling because of road conditions. When you add 20 enemy cars into the equation, I found that things actually got worse. It became essentially impossible to round any corner perfectly since I usually found myself slamming into every other car on the road as I tried to take a big turn.

There is a leveling system in place that should make fans of Modern Warfare happy, but that may irritate other players who want the ability to just dive in and enjoy the game. Since players unlock new cars and even special ability modifiers by earning fans during the races, I often found myself squaring off against opponents wielding vastly superior hardware. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that their cars really were significantly better, making the first several online matches more irritating than they had to be.

On the upside of things, the game looks really nice. It moves at a fluid framerate most of the time, even with tons of cars littering the screen. The art design is really impressive as well, with locations inspired by reality, but not necessarily tied to it. Car models are subtly quirky and the lighting and particle effects frequently dazzle.

I don’t know how much discussion about this is appropriate, but I will just mention here that there was a significant amount of lag in the Blur demo. In some of the worst matches, cars would teleport around the screen constantly, making for an infuriating play experience, as I dropped from 1st to 8th in the bat of an eyelash. This seems like an issue that will be addressed before launch, but it still irked me, so I thought it was worthy of mention.

Now, I know a bunch of people will harp on me for just being bad at the beta. Of course, there was probably some of that going on in my experience. However, it seems like the nature of Kart Racers should be to offer fairly accessible racing gameplay to people who aren’t generally proficient at the genre as a whole, but still want to have a good time. Blur seems to get this balance wrong, as the game just punishes new players without a clear method for bettering their skills (besides simply leveling up). I still want to see what the final product will hold for us, but at this point, I’m just bummed that we may never get another racing game as cool as Beetle Adventure Racing, which was so long ago.