Destruction Derby 64

Driving for real these days is just so dull, isn't it? You can't speed like a loon any more because some bunch of council jobsworths has stuck Gatsos every 50 yards, and there's never any open road anyway because they're all jammed up by roadworks. Thankfully, videogames are here to relieve your motoring frustrations. Most of them let you race to your heart's content, but THQ's Destruction Derby 64 goes one step further. The title drops a vague hint...

Yes, this game is all about smashing cars into each other until they look like twisted and burning metal Oxo cubes. The World Championship mode is the main part of the game for a single player. There are two types of challenge; the first is straightforward racing. Well, maybe not that straightforward. Things are made a little more dangerous by the fact that cars are racing around the circuit in both directions, and crashes are actively encouraged. Destruction Derby has a quite clever points system. Although the game is played against the clock, which normally means you have to concentrate on racing rather than tricksy stuff (1080° Snowboarding is a good example of this, where trying any kind of stunt work during a race tends to make you lose automatically), Destruction Derby rewards fender-bending with extra time, while the number of additional seconds you're awarded for reaching a checkpoint decreases every time you go through. This puts a very effective time limit on the race, so if the number of cars remaining in play is starting to run low and you're not high up in the points, you're forced to start looking for head-on collisions as quickly as you can.

The second kind of challenge is arena-based. Your car is dumped in a circular pit along with all the other motors, and left to get on with it. No time limits, no checkpoints, just a dozen cars smashing into each other as hard as they possibly can until only one is left. It may sound easy, but the computer-controlled cars are surprisingly good at staying out of your way! In both cases, being knocked out early on doesn't necessarily mean you can't still win a race, as the final rankings are all based on points and the best way to score them is by hitting other drivers.

Crunch

Destruction Derby has several multiplayer modes, though not all of them are available to more than two players. Three people only get the option of playing Deathmatch and Bomb Tag, while four-player matches can also engage in the 'thrills' of Capture The Flag. Actual races are only playable by one or two players, presumably because of speed issues – even with just two players, races start to get uncomfortably jerky. Most of the scenery in the one-player race is still there in the multiplayer game, but this is a case when it would probably have been better to sacrifice detail for smoothness.

Deathmatch is simply a multiplayer version of the arena stages from the one-player World Championship game. It actually keeps up a decent turn of speed even with four players, because of the small size of the arenas. The number of cars in the arena is cut from 12 to eight, but to be honest you don't really notice.

Bomb Tag is a variation on Deathmatch, where one car is stuck with a bomb that is rapidly ticking down to detonation, and the only way to get rid of it is by hitting another vehicle. It's actually a good laugh, and can get sweatily tense as you try to ram someone else before time runs out and the bomb explodes.

Capture The Flag, on the other hand, is fairly lame – we didn't even play for the full five minutes before got we bored and switched to something else. Pick up flag, drive to checkpoint, pick up flag, stifle big yawn.

Kwik-Fit

Things are mixed visually – although there's a lot of trackside detail, it all seems a bit grainy. It's oddly like looking at a PlayStation game, which is weird because Destruction Derby isn't a port, but has been completely redesigned for the N64. This graininess can make it quite hard to spot approaching traffic, which isn't what you want when you're down to your last three seconds on the timer and desperately need to slam head-on into that maroon Trans-Am going the other way.

Most of the time the game is fast and smooth, but a couple of tracks are clearly a bit too ambitious. The Midnyte Rumble track, for instance, gets as choppy as a speed-taking karate expert faced with a line of bricks. It's not unplayably jerky, but compared to the tracks that precede it, it's disconcerting.

So Very Tyred

The main problem with Destruction Derby is that, as a one-player game, it's far too easy. Case in point: your Editor. Not the world's greatest gamer by any means (though new-born babies, the thumbless and Stevie Wonder have cause to fear), but less than three hours' play was enough to complete the Championship game with gold medals in every category, a minimum 40 point lead over the second-place car and not a single continue required. That's the kind of difficulty level that makes beating the first stage of Yoshi's Story feel like trying to complete Zelda. With the TV set switched off.

All in all, Destruction Derby offers some short-term amusement, but it's got little longevity because it's so easy to finish. A couple of days' play and you'll have seen everything. It's fun while it lasts, especially as a multiplayer game, but it'll more than likely be traded in very quickly.

Four years ago, when Destruction Derby first appeared as a launch game for the PlayStation, the idea of driving very fast into other cars for points and then watching with an evil glint as bits of bumper, door and wheel flew off was - incredibly - good fun.

Present day, and this astonishingly late conversion looks and feels a little tired. Not surprising considering it's arrived about three years too late. But, the endlessly derivative courses, cardboard box cars and rapidly grating commentary seem somehow less appealing at the end of 1999. It's still fair all-round entertainment, but in these days of the weaponed-up Vigilante 8 and the straight-laced brilliance of World Driver, a game that falls between the two, but does neither particularly well, looks a bit like your Dad trying to dance at a school disco: old, unfashionable and hopelessly out of place.

DD64 offers the same sort of option choices as the second Destruction Derby on the PlayStation. The Championship mode obviously offers you the chance to unlock new courses and cars if you can win the DD league. You do that by either, a) driving around, missing other cars, and ending up the last car not on fire, or b) driving fast into other cars in an effort to bust 'em up good, hoping your car doesn't go up in flames in the process. All very simple, and even simpler when the standard tracks change to bowls - circular stadiums where there's no chance of escape, and where your only choice is to smash each other up.

And that's it. The only real surprise the game throws up is that it's not quite as tedious as it sounds. In fact, at times ifs strangely compulsive, particularly where the bowls are concerned. The trouble with the more straightforward tracks is that, once you get down to one or two of you, you spend ages driving round the empty course trying to find the remaining vehicles. At least the bowls are smaller, and actually, in multiplayer, the bowl-based Bomb Tag is absolutely fantastic. The downside, though, is that the game suffers from shocking frame rate problems when there's more than one player, though this is lessened inside the bowls.

But, even given the amusement of the bowls, DD64 is a bog standard N64 game. There are sparks of enjoyment throughout, but the concept is just too limiting and you can complete the one-player game in about half a day (and thafs with a couple of easily avoidable mistakes chalked up). Mildly fun, then, but pretty average.