Fast & Furious: Showdown

Fast & Furious: Showdown
This game does not seem to be too fast nor furious.
Genre(s): Action Racing Rating(s): ESRB: T PEGI: 12 ACB: M Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Nintendo 3DS PlayStation 3 Wii U Xbox 360 Release Date: NA: May 21, 2013 AU: May 22, 2013 EU: May 24, 2013 Developer(s): Firebrand Games Publisher(s): Activision Country: United Kingdom Series: Fast & Furious Predecessor: Fast & Furious 6 Successor: Fast & Furious Crossroads

Fast & Furious: Showdown is a racing video game based on the Fast & Furious franchise. It was developed by Firebrand Games and published by Activision for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 in May 2013.

Plot

The game begins with a cutscene featuring Monica Fuentes finding Riley Hicks digging around through files in her office, which the latter introduces herself as states that in 24 hours, she is going to meet Luke Hobbs to know everything he has been up to.

Gameplay

The game focuses on cooperative driving and car combat. The game is centered around different missions, all centered around driving around in semi-destructible loops. These missions can range from a normal race to surviving a certain number of laps.

Why It's A Slowdown

1. The graphics are absolutely terrible (especially on the 3DS and Wii U) and look like they were ripped straight from the era where video games were released for the sixth gen console, with the textures looking like they were made in PowerPoint in 4 minutes and models looking like they were made out of cheap plastic. It is worth mentioning that this game was released in 2013, instead of 2002.
2. Lazily done main menu. The game shows a black background with the font from the cover art, no background, no animation, no title, or anything else. Despite the poor-looking main menu, yet they've added a lot of options, from video quality, changing effects to improve the processing power of your equipment, to key configuration, and volume.
3. Poorly written plot that looks like it was written by a college student who was probably dancing to some random music way too much instead of writing a creative plot.
4. Horrible controls in general. Regardless of which vehicle you choose, each vehicle moves like a cardboard box on ice with a bunch of stones inside it. Turning around is not easy to control as well, as the vehicles turn around as if their wheels were covered in glue.
5. Awful physics. Notably, when you hit something even when you're driving really fast, your vehicle will just simply bounce very slightly like a balloon. The vehicles in this game are also more like tanks without any cannons, as no matter how much you'll hit another vehicle, yours will survive without any problem and the other vehicle will just bounce rather high for no reason after hitting yours. One of the vehicles even causes other vehicles to just drive on it, or even throw them into oblivion, which is just laughable.
6. The driving model is horrendous, very archaic, and not realistic. Regardless of whether you drive an ordinary car, off-road vehicle, or even a Jeep, the vehicles are driven like cardboard boxes, covered to the brim with rubble on ice. Twisting is bizarre, and any collision with objects either ends in nothing for you, because the impact is not detected, or you bounce off the surface like a helium balloon.
7. The game can be illogical. There is a situation in which opponents supposedly have huge magnets that make you stick to them with any contact, sometimes while leading or behind, the opponents unexpectedly collide with other elements of the movement.
8. Monotonous and horrible possibly looped engine sounds, none of the cars feel like they sound like a car at all, all are weak and very unfitting to any car. In fact, the most notable example is the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.
9. While there is an actual speedometer and even a small gear indicator HUD, there's no RPM display, which is unacceptable for 2013 driving game standards. However, RPM displays are not always required.
10. Barely happening on every car, the rear tires' speed is limited, they can't go any faster, and are way off from the car's speed.
11. The voice acting is also terrible and cringeworthy. Activision didn't even hire the original voice actors from the films. Instead, you will hear the rattling of amateurs who see a microphone for the first time, wondering what such equipment is actually doing and where it is going.
12. Weak other sound effects that, for example, the collision, sound more like a modified plate-smashing sound rather than a collide with a car.
13. All of the real-life licensed cars are basically Chrysler/FCA manufacturers, which can be disappointing.
14. Despite having several stages, the missions are very repetitive and boring. These range from generic races, a simple mode where you have to avoid police cars, to a mode where you have to throw grenades thrown by your enemies onto a truck.
15. The last mission is nothing but a lazy recycle of the same mission that can be played at the beginning. Everything in the recycled mission is the same, ranging from cutscenes, dialogues, and other stuff, which is complete laziness.
16. Shooting missions are such a disaster, as the gameplay quickly becomes boring after a tedious mission duration or incompetent opponents. For the game to try to be cool, while boring, time slows down for some unknown reason when defeating an opponent.
    • The hit system in these missions is bad. Either you kill with one shot, or you fire a series of shots and he's still alive. Sometimes shooting at the wheels from the side ends up in disaster, and sometimes when you shoot when someone is facing you, the car becomes a thing of the past.
17. The missions with quick time event elements: At some points in the game, you have to jump onto an oncoming truck or Jeep to plant a bomb or simply to force the enemy driver to get out of the vehicle with the hands of your character. To do this, you need to press a key, get over your vehicle, keep the balance by pressing the action button mercilessly, jump on the vehicle, keep your balance again by spamming a space, move to a given enemy's vehicle and press enter to take control or plant a bomb. This is only what you have to do every time QTE elements appear.
18. The mission of taking down explosive grenades thrown by enemies at a given truck quickly becomes boring and repetitive. Additionally, such a mission lasts as long as three minutes. Not to mention that the opponents are constantly throwing exploding packages in exactly the same places.
19. There are only thirty missions in the game overall, and the last one they added is exactly the same as in the first mission. Everything is almost identical, from dialogues, scripts to elements of the surroundings and the route itself.
20. When you get experience points and unlock new cars, the new cars are basically the same thing, with the only thing you unlock if you get a higher level are just new colours. That's it, nothing else.
21. The A.I. is extremely poor. When your enemies want to hit you, all they do is just temporarily glue next to your car, they don't care if you're passing through them to win a race, some enemies just hit each other for no reason, and if you try to damage them, they just simply drive onto you just so they can allow you to deal damage to them. With these flaws, the A.I. in Fast & Furious: Showdown is arguably one of the worst A.I. in racing games.
22. Lack of faithfulness to the original source material. An early level recreates the vault scene from Fast Five but replaces Vin Diesel's character with Ludacris' character. Also, the problem, as previously mentioned in WIS #10 pointer, is that the original voice actors aren't even featured. Ending on Dom Toretto himself, one of the most characteristic characters played by Vin Diesel, does not appear at all.
23. While not too bad, the soundtrack is rather generic as it is a mix of pop and rock, something common in racing games like Fast & Furious.
24. There are a few strange bugs that make the player scratch their heads in confusion, similar to bugs in Action 52 or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. For example, the shadows sometimes disappear shortly for no reason at all, when you reach the edge of the map, the camera suddenly goes underground, and the game can randomly crash once or twice. Probably the weirdest bug in the whole game is that when you change some of your settings, they do not work when you first change them, which itself is confusing for a 2013 racing game. At least the bugs aren't that much game-breaking, but still.
25. The designs of the levels try to imitate open-world maps, but in reality, they consist of small areas where all of the missions take place, the only thing that makes them slightly different is that the game restricts the maps according to the kind of mission. Some of the levels even recycle the same specific areas, but in backwards.
26. Some of the levels are not accurate to the era or geographic zone where the game takes place:
    • According to one of the cutscenes, the Mexican mission takes place in a zone that in reality is too far away from the real-life existing highways (Probably taking place in San Luis Potosi or Zacatecas), but even if the level was probably based on some of those nearby highways and it doesn't have to be 100% realistic, the level is still inaccurate because many signals in the level show up cities that are too far away from the previously mentioned position, like Mazatlan (Which is located in the western part of the country, while the other states are in the east). This level is also anachronic because in the landscapes the player can appreciate several wind farms, in real life, those wind farms were built three years in the aforementioned states after the game was released.
    • The case of the Buenos Aires' levels is even worse because the vehicles of the cops use an emblem showing up the Peruvian territory on the sides. In case that you don't know, Argentina is not even next to Peru and the characters that participate in that mission's mention that they have stolen a car from a base of the Argentinian Police Department.
27. The challenge mode is an obvious grind in which you have to complete the same tasks, such as:
    • Driving through the gate with a camera at the fastest speed possible.
    • Staying on the road, defeating enemy's vehicles appearing out of nowhere.
    • Drifting.
28. Car modification is totally cheesy and is only limited to cosmetic elements. The only thing the game has to offer is to change the color of the car, rims and decals. In addition, to improve them, you need to collect points that you receive in a given mission in the campaign or in the challenge mode.
29. Despite having thirty missions in total, the campaign length is extremely short, lasting between two and three hours.
30. Just like Crossroads, the game costed over $40 at launch, which is absolutely too high for an extremely low-quality game.
31. And to top it all off, there's no updates and new additions.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The soundtrack, despite being generic, is alright and catchy, as it is a mix of pop and rock.
2. The cover looks very cool, and is probably the best thing about the game.
3. Some cars are enjoyable, such as the Flip Car from Fast & Furious 6, which is unintentionally hilarious due to the poor physics.
4. The console versions and PC version somewhat have a bit better graphics, and less bugs/glitches.

Reception

Upon release, Fast & Furious: Showdown received very negative reviews from both critics and players. On Metacritic, the game has a 21/100 score for the PS3 version, while the Xbox 360 version has a 22/100 score.

Nintendo Life gave the Wii U version a 2/10, summarizing: "Perhaps this game was developed in just a few months by an under-funded and over-stretched team, who knows. What we do know is that Fast & Furious: Showdown is one of the worst retail titles we've played in a long time and does nothing but bring discredit to Activision as its publisher. If blasting through over 30 repetitive stages with awful physics, stiff controls and abysmal visuals is your idea of fun, then you're doing this video game hobby thing wrong, and you may like this."

Metro GameCentral gave for the Xbox 360 version a 1/10, in short, they described that the game is a "cynically awful movie tie-in that is not just a terrible racing game but squanders the potential of it source material in almost criminal fashion." In summary, the advantage they mentioned was that the game is short (because for them it's a bad game, hence is an "advantage") and the disadvantage was that this game exists at all.

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