I finally completed WipEout HD (and Fury) and achieved Transcendence platinum; so after experiencing absolutely everything the game has to offer, I’m left with these feelings toward the game.

I think a game really shows it’s true potential when played on the highest difficulty setting. With, for example, Killzone 2, it remained extremely difficult but well-developed strategies stood fair game and kept its water-tight integrity intact. In contrast, Call of Duty World at War did not. Waves of grenade spamming, gung ho trigger-happy, perfect-shot, continually spawning, moronic enemies made certain that your Veteran difficulty gaming experience was the most frustrating and least enjoyable challenge possible.

Unfortunately, I feel WipEout HD is very similar to the latter. More trigger-happy, rocket spamming, mine-field laying, on-rails competitors and an inhuman higher difficulty setting, most likely alienates the majority of players, so that only the absolute die-hard & professional vets can access the entire game. And as far as I believe (and have always been under the impression is standard), video games should be accessible and enjoyable by everyone. Okay, so that is what higher difficulty settings are for (to challenge the seasoned and familiar gamers) but WipEout HD’s Easy difficulty will make many players give up after the first few games (learning curves anyone!? not here).

Pirhana racing Goteki 45 on Tech De Ra

A few things that particularly frustrated me though. Competitors seem to have an unfair advantage under certain circumstances–if behind them (especially–directly behind them!!) they most often lay mines and bombs, and if you’re in front they appear to fire mostly projectiles. Similarly, this often applies to me; when in last position, I often only pick up mines, bombs & auto-pilots! great! When I’m in first place, I often pick up quakes, missiles, plasmas. Awesome!

Like destruction derby; another thing that made the races much more uncontrollable/ unpredictable was that other ships appear to be a lot more glued to the track, they’ll barge and ram you out of the way (sometimes off track completely) whilst they remain, for the most part, unmovable and rarely yield to being nudged. Unlike a car racing game (TOCA Touring Car Championship aside), this game will not allow, in terms of time constraints and due to the break-neck speed, for you to strategically work your way closely around the other vehicles.

Many times, especially during the later Elite Phantom Class races, other racers would go absolutely berserk it would seem with sometimes, what would appear to be, a sole purpose of sending me to the sky in flames–ramming my craft even to the point of eliminating themselves in the process. It is worth mentioning that even online racing against human opponents is never as brutal as the game (how does one beat a computer after all?).

WipEout HD Elimination

Sometimes, it feels like the game is too fast for its own good. The scale of the pilots in the craft would suggest that the ships are actually really huge, and yet they travel at this seriously unrealistic speed, and sometimes the design of the tracks really doesn’t accommodate for these types of top speeds. For, example, auto-pilots engaged at the wrong moment will, on occasion, result in the craft being forced into the air and into a wall or a corner of the track (or fly completely off track altogether), forcing the craft to respawn–by which time, you’ve gone from second place to eighth place! And vehicle stats mean very little (almost nothing), especially in the Elite stages.

Pilot assist is okay and helps avoid some of these more extreme issues but on the later stages and higher AI difficulty settings, it actually slows the ship down so much with constant air-braking that it becomes almost impossible to win a race with PA on. In fact, it’s most likely more difficult to achieve a good race position with PA on than if you switch it off and scrape the sides a few times.

Controls overall are very responsive and you can rarely blame a loss of position due to poorly developed control system… except for side-shifts; they can be amazing if timed absolutely perfect but they can also end in disaster when what was intended as a subtle correction of air-braking is mis-interpreted as a desire to side-shift and slams you into the side of the track (wall). Really, there should be an option to turn this control feature off completely (like PA or any other optional extra). Or at least assign [allow them to be mapped] them to the primary/secondary shoulder buttons.

I found the SIXAXIS motion sensitivity (nose up, nose down) to be, for the most part, pointless other than for a very few specific occasions. Most outrageously, angling nose down doesn’t assist in making the craft go faster, similarly, nosing up–even to the absolute highest degree, doesn’t slow the craft down at all.

WipEout HD

Anyway, aside from a few outragous annoyances–I mostly enjoyed the entire game. I liked particularly that it wasn’t an easy challenge, haha! The presentation is perfect, and the futuristic theme is breath-taking; craft and track modelling is really beautiful. I just wish there was a story showing some characters–even more integrated with the stunning environments would be amazing.

The different modes, races, tournaments, time-trials, speed-laps, and now also the elimination, detonator, and zone battles are all fun and there a soo many variations that there are hours and hours of fun, improving times, leader board scores, etc. Zone mode!!–the joy & the visual effects are absolutely stunning and is one of my favourite events. I will be aiming to improve on my best zone score so far (Zone 76).