GT Sport may look and feel like Gran Turismo, but it's a very different beast under the hood. In place of an extensive single player campaign and an exhaustive car roster, developer Polyphony Digital have established a professionally sanctioned esport-focused racing platform under the watchful eye of The Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. There's no denying that GT Sport hits a few bumps along the way, and struggles somewhat under the weight of Gran Turismo's legacy. But when viewed as something new, GT Sport accomplishes nearly everything it sets out to do. It offers a wonderfully detailed and responsive driving experience along with arguably the cleanest and most competitive online racing on a console to date.
The renewed focus comes at a cost, with GT Sport offering a meager 160 cars (far less if you discount variants) and 40 courses based on 17 distinct tracks. And because your progress, earnings, and reputation are linked to your competitive profile, GT Sport requires an internet connection for most of its content--single player included. The only exception are one-off races in arcade mode, but your rewards there won't be saved unless you keep the game running until servers are back online. It's one huge caveat, and while maintenance and outage periods have been minimal post-release, losing access to most of GT Sport isn't unheard of.
Despite the relatively small selection of cars, each one is beautifully rendered with an incredible attention to detail. And while GT Sport's tracks lack dynamic lighting and weather effects, each real-world track has been laser scanned to an impressive degree of accuracy. Marry these qualities with the improved tire and suspension models, beefy engine tones and screaming tire sounds, and GT Sport makes a strong impression behind the wheel.
Online races are your ultimate goal, and come in a few different forms. While you can create a private lobby to race with friends, most of the action happens in the organized daily races. Daily races occur at set times--usually every 5 to 10 minutes, though this can change--and come in three options, each with varying rules and regulations. Place well and you'll see your Driver Rating improve, which defines the skill of the drivers you'll be placed into future races with. If you place poorly you'll naturally see your driver rating drop, and be forced race with less capable and confident drivers.
Ranking highly isn't everything, and will mean nothing if you fail to race cleanly along the way. The overarching system monitoring everything you do is called the Sportsmanship Rating, which counts all incidents you're involved in, regardless of fault. Shown as a rank of A through to F, put a wheel wrong by touching another car, leaving the track or, unfortunately, being rammed, and you'll lose some of your sportsmanship rating. Drive a few clean laps and you'll recover what's lost eventually, though it's clear the no-fault system is a sore point, causing needless annoyance at losing SR on top of having a race ruined.
On the same foot, though, it appears to be working. Although turn 1 tends to be a bit of a nightmare, once things are underway races are generally as clean as you'd hope for. Cars recovering from spins or looking like they're going to crash will ghost, letting you drive right through them, though this can be a bit sketchy at times as you can't really tell when a car will solidify. Thankfully there are plenty of assists like ABS and traction control to help racers who might struggle, which can also be turned off for the hardcore or those with wheel and pedal setups. These support systems are a boon beginners who may be intimidated by GT Sport's demanding races but nonetheless want a taste of competition.
Outside of the daily events are the officially sanctioned championship events, which in practice are run similarly to daily races, but with a few core differences. Each round runs five races at pre-scheduled times roughly once a month, and like the daily races there's a small window of time for you to sign up. The main difference is that you can only sign up and compete in a round once, so if you have a bad run in the first of the five scheduled races for that round, you don't get another chance to improve your results. While intimidating, this also adds a palpable sense of tension to the beginning stages of each race.
The number of points you can earn per race is worked out using a few variables, but is mostly down to your driver rating; the higher your rating, the more potential championship points you can earn per race. Your final points tally is accumulated from your three best finishes, ensuring that a bad race or having to miss one because of other commitments won't put you out of contention. In general, the level of competition is extremely cutthroat, making race wins--especially in the official championship races--very difficult to come by.
That said, there is plenty of satisfaction to gain from merely finishing races. Personal achievements aside, every race rewards you with in-game credits, mileage points--another in-game currency used to upgrade cars or purchase paint decals, wheel rims and the like to customize your car with--and experience points that raise your driver level. You're given a new car for each driver level you attain, up to and including level 20, and the Daily Workout bonus also gives you a new car after driving only 40 kilometers (just under 25 miles) in a day, so it doesn't take long to amass a personal car collection.
Where you fall on GT Sport will mirror how you feel about racing games in general. If you're looking for a highly focused console racing sim, GT Sport is excellent, but don't come looking for a robust "Gran Turismo" experience.
Given the focus on online races, the single-player campaign is more an elaborate training tool than any campaign from a prior GT game, geared to prepare you for the jump to racing online. Its three modes--Driving School, Mission Challenge and Circuit Experience--each cover a specific aspect of racing, be that the car handling, knowing the circuits or knowing how to race with other cars without running them off the road. In clear Gran Turismo tradition, hit the bronze target time for the exercise and you can move on. But although this is a good measure of your performance, a more detailed, visual breakdown of your runs would go a long way towards making these lessons more effective at making you a better racer. Accompanying YouTube videos give you an impression of how it's done, but something that gives more feedback would be more welcome. Arcade mode is the closest you'll get to the traditional style of campaign, letting you pick your car and track combo then race offline against the AI, who do a good job of racing cleanly but with a measured sense of aggression too.
Ultimately, where you fall on GT Sport will mirror how you feel about racing games in general. If you're looking for a highly focused console racing sim, GT Sport is excellent, but don't come looking for a robust "Gran Turismo" experience. You won't find it. Casual fans will feel the pinch of the scaled-down offering and the intimidating push towards racing online. But for sim-racers with a competitive spirit, it's easy to look past the smaller car and track roster and appreciate the incredibly detailed and responsive driving model, which is better than anything the series has offered before.
The original Hand of Fate succeeded largely on the strength of its concept. It combined the rules of a roguelike with a deck-building card game to create something unique, and the devious, ever-present Dealer made the whole thing feel like a single-player Dungeons & Dragons experience where the Dungeon Master was actively trying to stop you. It was a great idea, but had some major issues that held it back from reaching its full potential. It was a good game crying out for a great follow-up; thankfully, Hand of Fate 2 has delivered just that.
In each of the sequel's 22 missions, you select several encounter and equipment cards from your personal deck. These are then mixed in with the Dealer's deck to form the card base you're playing with. The cards are scattered onto a table face-down, although the shape and structure they form changes on a mission-by-mission basis. As you move across the table turning over one card at a time (usually either looking for or moving towards a specific card), you're issued challenges that might or might not help you achieve the mission's goal. The outcomes of several situations are dictated by games of chance and skill--rolling dice, perfectly timing a button press to an on-screen pendulum, stopping a spinning wheel at the right time--and there are various stats you need to follow and maintain, as your character can run out of money or starve to death. There are also several cards that throw you into combat, at which point the game briefly turns into a third-person action experience until all your enemies are downed (or you die, failing the mission).
While in the first game you were constantly on the hunt for the boss card, in Hand of Fate 2 there's far more variety in objectives, and the game is better for it. You usually still have to find and kill a boss, but each mission now has its own gimmick. These can include challenging you to work out which character of three is plotting a murder, or tasking you with escorting an innocent potato farmer. Each mission has a strong sense of identity and purpose, and many of them are clever.
However, while the game gives you plenty of opportunities to escape bad situations or reasons to rethink your deck if your current plan isn't working, the start-over-if-you-die structure can sometimes be excessively frustrating in certain scenarios. A prime example is the Justice mission, in which you travel around the 28 cards laid out on the table, gathering resources and dodging enemies through games of chance, continually traveling back to your base card to use said resources to strengthen your fort. It's tremendous fun, but less so when you're killed an hour into it, right at the end of one of the many, many intense battles you've been made to fight. It's hard to pull yourself back into retrying a mission when these things happen. It also took me many attempts to beat the Strength mission, which starts you at low health and takes away your ability to heal by eating food. In a typical roguelike, where heavy randomisation makes the game feel different each time you enter, this wouldn't seem like a big deal. But the individual missions in Hand of Fate 2 often ask you to fight the same battles repeatedly, and replaying the more difficult ones over and over is a strain. Thankfully, until you reach the very end, you'll have multiple unfinished missions unlocked at any given point; if one is giving you grief you can usually jump into another.
Hand of Fate 2's combat has gone through an overhaul. It discards the ineffective camera, clunky controls, and unclear parry cues for a system that feels much closer to the Batman: Arkham Asylum fighting system that so clearly inspired it. It's not a unique system, and the game lacks variety in both enemies and tactical possibilities, but it's now much more satisfying to take on a group of enemies. Parry and dodge cues are clear, and managing the timing of your attacks and moves requires active attention.
You can equip different weapons before battle, which are divided into three classes (heavy, two-handed, and one-handed), and what to equip largely depends on your opponent. Thieves, for instance, are weak against blade attacks, which do little damage but let you attack multiple times in quick succession, while several different kinds of guard are easier to fight if you're carrying a one-handed sword and a shield. However, the more hectic battles can still be hard to read, and the quality of the fights may vary depending on which equipment you've managed to source during your journey--if you aren't able to find or buy useful weapons, it can turn into a slog. Luck plays a big part in Hand of Fate 2, and while you can manufacture better luck with a good deck, there's always the somewhat frustrating possibility that random chance will strike you down.
In most missions you're joined by one of four unlockable companions who provide buffs during combat and specialize in improving your odds of victory in some specific circumstances. The mighty Colbjorn, for instance, can offer an extra die for you to roll should you need it in certain scenarios. These companions also add to the already rich incidental storytelling of the game. Playing through each mission, uncovering cards, and watching as conflicts and allegiances twist and shift depending on the story you're pursuing at any given point gives you a strong sense of the game's world, even if it's largely confined to text. The Dealer, who is once again voiced by Anthony Skordi, is a treasure of a character, repeatedly referencing events from the first game and hinting at the dark secrets he keeps stored somewhere within his robes. He's not an antagonist in the same way he was in the original game, and ultimately feels like a deeper, more mysterious character.
The moments of frustration in Hand of Fate 2 are worth enduring for the sweetness of its adventures, and getting to know the different cards and learning to build a deck that is perfectly suited for the mission you're entering is satisfying. Hand of Fate 2 is a realization of the first game's promise, and it's exciting to play a game that blends seemingly unrelated elements together so well.
Rocket League was a phenomenon when it debuted in 2015, and two years later it shows no signs of slowing down. The unorthodox sports game is a mix of soccer and vehicular acrobatics that's immediately engaging, but a high skill ceiling ensures that you can put hundreds of hours into Rocket League online and continue to improve your control over car and ball alike. In our original review, editor Miguel Concepcion said "the promising concept of combining two wonderful things--cars and soccer--is equally magnificent in execution." It's unique, it's complex, and now that it's on the Nintendo Switch, it's wonderfully portable.
Rocket League makes the leap to handheld courtesy of developer Panic Button, the same team responsible for the respectable Switch port of Doom. And similar to that conversion, Rocket League's visuals have been somewhat stripped down to maintain a steady frame rate under the Switch's hardware limitations. The impact of the downgraded visuals can be seen in jagged edges and fluctuating texture resolutions, but unlike a game that relies on a world to set the stage for characters and narrative events, Rocket League's Switch scars are easily overlooked. The only time they can interfere is when playing handheld, where choppy models make it difficult to differentiate between objects in the foreground and background on Switch's small display. This, thankfully, is rarely an issue.
When you're focused on a handful of other drivers and protecting your goal from a fast-moving ball, jaggies are the least of your concerns. And when subconsciously calculating your trajectory as you ramp up onto a wall and blast your rockets for a last-minute boost to slam a ball into the back of a goal from mid-air, you probably aren't focused on a blurry texture here or there. Rocket League on Switch isn't always a pretty game, but that doesn't stop if from being every bit as exciting and competitive as it is on other platforms. As someone who has spent upwards of 200 hours with Rocket League on PS4, I was pleased to find that jumping into matches on Switch was just as easy as before, in terms of both matchmaking and controlling my car on the field--thanks in part to the rock-solid frame rate.
The game's Nintendo-exclusive rides and their series-appropriate sound effects are small if charming touches that make the Switch version feel slightly more special than it otherwise would have. But the big new feature is local splitscreen play on the go. Relative to the constraints of playing on a small screen, it works as well as you'd hope, to say nothing of the surprising effectiveness of controlling your car with a mere single joycon. Small and short a few buttons, they still cover almost every input on traditional controller setups. The one notable exception is the lack of a second analog stick for camera control when you aren't locked onto the ball.
Switch players can engage in cross-network play with Rocket League's Xbox One and PC community. As evidenced during our pre-launch tests, this system works without a hitch, and matches are readily available. The one minor caveat when it comes to playing online with others is that creating custom messages mid-match is less convenient than usual. This is because toggling chat brings up a window that takes up the entire screen, leaving you without the usual live feed that runs in the background in other versions of the game. You do have the option of connecting a USB keyboard if you want to type out messages while your Switch is docked, which can help speed up the process.
Save for its presentation, Rocket League on Switch is every bit the game it is elsewhere, and when you factor in its newfound portability, it's also the most versatile. That alone makes it attractive to regular Rocket League competitors.
For people new to the game, they have a lot to look forward to regardless, as it's one of the most fascinating sports games in memory. Nevermind if you don't like soccer or couldn't care less about the growing esports community. Rocket League is a unique game that redefines the concept of what a sports game can be, and Psyonix continues to support it with new content on a regular basis. It's been around for a while, but now that it's on Switch, there's no better time to give it a shot.
Editor's note: for a more in-depth analysis of Rocket League, check out our original review from July, 2015.
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