The latest racing experience on the PS2 comes from Kemco with their addictive adventure racing game, Top Gear: Dare Devil. Papaya Studio has worked for 11 hard months to bring their latest game to the PS2 and their hard work has paid off. They have created a fun game with addictive gameplay but unfortunately it is a bit lacking in depth. The game is like Grand Theft Auto minus the illegal elements. Top Gear: DD takes the genre and strips it down to its bare elements, that is, giving players a rewarding gaming experience every time they play. The basic concept is to zoom around real-life cities collecting coins and returning to the finish point before the timer reaches zero. Simple idea but very fun.

Gameplay
There is nothing complicated about this game. The goal is simply to race through city streets, collecting the required amount of coins before the timer runs out. In the single player mode you become a member of a dare devil team. You must complete all the missions in each city before unlocking the next. There are four to unlock with each one containing more missions and more complex layout. Besides collecting the dare devil coins, there is also nitro boosts, clocks (to add time to the clock), wrenches (earn continues) and keys (unlock bonus stages). You don't have to collect every coin in each mission to complete it but if you do grab every one, you'll earn a new car, and there are many to unlock with varied handling, speed and acceleration. In the bonus stages the goal is to smash into things to accumulate points. Gather enough points within the time limit and your car gets a funky paint job.

The key to collecting the required amount of coins within the time limit is to find the most efficient route throughout the city streets. Good driving skills won't hurt either and learning how to take turns quickly is an essential skill to learn not to mention fun. There is a low and a high camera view. The low camera looks cooler but the high one is more practical for seeing further ahead. The vehicles' control is quite realistic so you can perform power slides using the hand brake, which allow you to take turns without loosing much speed. Although Top Gear: DD uses the analog stick for steering, the full range of sensitivity is lacking. If the stick is moved slightly, the vehicle hardly turns at all. If the stick is moved all the way, the vehicle will swerve wildly. This isn't the problem; the problem is that there isn't much sensitivity in the middle of these ranges of motions. Fortunately this problem can be overcome with a little practice and getting used the controls. One of the aspects of the control of the vehicles that I particularly find handy is that at low speeds, you can turn on a dim. This is very useful if you miss a coin but need to backtrack to get to it quickly. Some of the physics are a bit far fetched however, for the sake of keeping the game fun. So even the tiny Pod can send double-decker buses hurtling through the air! Since you must navigate on busy city streets there is a lot of traffic. But usually it doesn't get in your way because you can easily smash the cars out of your way, but occasionally they can stop you dead in your tracks. The collision detection seems to be somewhat inconsistent but it doesn't happen that often. If you have an exact head on collision with another vehicle than it will probably stop you in a hurry but if you hit one slightly at an angle than you can plow through it without slowing down hardly at all.

If there is one thing that is annoying in this game, it is the continue system. You get three continues if you lose a mission and you can collect wrenches to earn more but what is really the point of this? With the memory card you can save your game after every mission so if you loose the next one it's not game over. All you have to do is load your game again. The annoying part is that when you run out of continues and lose a mission, it kicks you back to the intro. sequence of the game and then you have to wait for the game to load again. The continues are pointless and should have been left out of the game.

Now to the multiplayer mode. It is a two player horizontally split screen mode featuring three ways to race. There is the traditional lap race where you and an opponent race a certain number of laps on customized tracks made for lap racing. The next mode is coin grab. This is exactly the same as the single player game except that you and a friend compete to see who can gather the most coins first. Finally there is bomb tag which is my personal favorite. One player starts off carrying a bomb on their car. They must run into their opponent to pass the bomb to them and who ever has the bomb when the timer reaches zero, explodes and loses (of course). These multiplayer modes can be quite fun but unfortunately they don't last very long. The time you have to play one game is very short and you cannot adjust the time either. In the end I think it comes up a bit short but is still a great mode that will give the player something to do after they've beaten the single player mode.

Overall, the developers have delivered a polished game with few flaws in the core mechanics and have successfully created an addictive and most important of all, fun gameplay experience. It's just too bad there isn't more of it. There are so many more things that could have been done with this game to bring it over the top. Although the cars look great, they don't take on damage; there are no pedestrians, which is very strange considering that you are driving in downtown areas. Considering that the crashes look so cool, it is a shame there isn't some sort of demolition derby style mode. But I guess that could be an idea for a sequel.

Graphics
This is yet another beautiful looking game on the PS2. There are four large real-life cities that players can race through including Rome, London, Tokyo and of course, San Francisco. The levels are basically a fully re-created replica of the downtown area of each city. There are many cars to unlock too and they are quite unique to say the least. Players will find everything from the German made "Pod" to the United States made "Black Widow". There is a mixture of old-fashioned urban mini cars as well as modern sports cars such as the "Super Genius" and "Road Shark". Each is meticulously designed with great detail and you can even see through the windows at the driver steering it! Although it is hard to say whether the reflections on the cars are real-time, whichever method was used to create them was a very good one because it makes the cars look very realistic.

The city environments are very impressive and contain a good amount of detail on the building textures and road surface. During sunny races, you can see the sunlight shinning on the road between the shadows of large buildings looming above which seem to bring the environments to vivid life. In comparison, cloudy days give the environment a dreary, gray look.

Each time you advance to another city, you are treated with an intro. FMV for that city which shows a jet plane swooping over it. The intro for the game itself is also quite spectacular. Unfortunately, each city looks almost exactly the same in terms of texture variety. They all seem to have the same look but the actual layout changes greatly. The game runs at 60 frames per second most of the time, which makes everything run very smooth and life-like. There is some minor slow-down that occurs occasionally when you round a corner but it only lasts for a couple of seconds. It is nothing to worry about because it doesn't affect the gameplay to any significant amount. There are also some pretty cool effects like exploding barrels and shattering glass, which marks just a small amount of the carnage that players can create throughout the city streets.

Sound
Top Gear: DD has an enjoyable array of songs to listen to as you play through the missions that have very crisp sounding and realistic instruments. The tunes aren't anything that's going to blow you away but they aren't annoying in any way. The action can get pretty loud so the music often gets drowned out over all of the crashing, metal grinding, glass breaking and drown of your car's engine. All the effects sound great and if you have your system connected to a home theater, you will definitely be in for some bone crunching sound effects to compliment the brutal crashes that you'll find yourself in as you plow through traffic.

Value
Like I said before, the game is over all too soon. However if this game appeals to you then you may stick around long enough to unlock everything in the game and get the best scores. There is incentive to earn more cars in the game which keep getting cooler and faster the farther along you go. The multiplayer mode is another great way to have some fun with the game when friends come over. If the older gamers can get over Top Gear: DD's simplified, non-violent gameplay then they will find that this game is quite addictive. You'll want to collect all the coins and keys in the levels, and combine that with a game that is just fun to play and you've got a game that might be worth your dollars. Check it out.