London Racer
| London Racer | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 "Have you ever dreamt of blasting through rush hour traffic at 180mph?"
| ||||||||||||||
|
London Racer (also known as M25 Racer) is a racing game released in 2000 for the PlayStation and the PC. It was developed and published by Davilex, and was the beginning of the London Racer franchise, as well as the continuation of Davilex's Racer franchise (other titles include USA Racer and A2 Racer).
Davilex was located in Houten in the Netherlands and was formed in 1997 until the gaming department was closed in 2005 due to their games being badly received and the company not making enough profit.
Why It Sucks
- Misleading opening cutscene. It features a nice looking supercar (similar to the McLaren F1) which you cannot race in the PS1 version despite being featured in the opening scene. It also features typos (e.g. Admiralty Arch is misspelled as Admirality Arch). A list of places in the game is featured, and some are repeated twice (Whitehall and Buckingham Palace).
- Many typos throughout the game. The menu comes up with "Race Menue" and when finishing your race you pick up "Price Money". Other examples include getting a "Reparair" whilst upgrading your car and when you finish the game, it says that you are "Winniner of All".
- Fake and somewhat obvious car names (MINI = Nime, Volkswagen New Beetle = Bietl, Opel Astra = Opal Aster, BMW Z3 = BWM, Audi TT = Horch DD, Jaguar XKR = Trafalguar).
- There are only six cars to choose from throughout the game.
- There are only eight tracks to race on throughout the game.
- Terrible draw distance where landmarks, cars, and scenery pop up instantly as you drive.
- Dreadfully low frame rate.
- Frequent glitches.
- Poor textures.
- Incredibly bad collision detection. Sometimes you can hit cars and objects despite not being remotely close to them, crashing into supposedly empty space, and other times you can just drive through objects such as trees and signs. Annoying, not all of these trees and signs you can drive through.
- The car cannot be driven onto pavements, which is especially tricky when navigating through a narrow road or street, and you can repeatedly bounce off them.
- Once you get close to 100% damage, a black smoke animation appears which obscures your point of view.
- Terrible AI. Other cars do not slow down when you are stopped by the police and can also drive through police cars.
- The police cars themselves do not seem to care about you crashing into them or hitting obstacles such as speed cameras, just if you are driving the speed limit.
- The skybox appears to move faster than the track you are on when you hit a police car.
- Annoying police siren sound effect.
- You're unable to replay previously played tracks to get more money.
- You carry any damage you accumulated on your previous race onto the next one. A game breaking glitch is when you carry nearly 100% of damage onto the next track, and if you spend all of your money on upgrades and not a repair job, a single bump on the next track results in a "total loss" and the race ends.
Reception
London Racer is the second lowest rated PS1 game on GameFAQs, with a rating of 1.05 out of 5. It is behind only The Master's Fighter, however, that game was only released in Japan, making this the lowest rated European PS1 game on the entire site.
However, the PC version received higher ratings on GameFAQs, being 2.98 out of 5 (Fair).