DT Carnage for PSP Reviews & Ratings by IGN

It's been almost eight months since DT Carnage hit the PS2, and it would appear that time didn't go to improving the game much during its move to the PSP. Like the PS2 version, DT Carnage's portable iteration isn't without some promise, but most of that is squandered on a number of little things that hamper any real enjoyment that could be gleaned from extended time with the game.



The idea, for those not interested in reading Jeff's original review, is that the game merges limited elements of RPG-like progression, an extremely light (and ultimately pointless) story and some basic car combat. It's actually not a bad idea; the PSP isn't nearly as loaded with stand-out entries into the racing and RPG fields, and there's next to nothing in the way of car combat, so the doors were wide open for Agetec and Korean developer Axis Entertainment to patch things up and give it a proper go as a portable title.



Trouble is, there's very, very little in the way of actual fun to be had here. The game's tutorials are agonizingly boring and slow, forcing the player to keep going well after they've understood the basic concepts. Here they are in a nutshell: finish first, blow everyone else up by nabbing power-ups held in little gates scattered around the tracks, win. These lessons can be skipped, but if you want to have any hope of actually finishing a race in anything but last place once you start the game's career mode in earnest, you're going to have to play the tutorials to earn the necessary points to improve base attributes.



It's all rather Final Fantasy X-ish, really. Take the Sphere Grid from that game, turn it into a checkerboard-decorated series of connected squares that hide upgrades to base stats like handling, acceleration, top speed and skill points (more on that in a second), and assign 'em all a cost and whammo, you've got a nice way to feel a sense of progression. Except you don't. Not when you pour hundreds of points into the individual attributes for your assigned driver (which doesn't even make sense anyway; if all the cars drive according to your base stats, why even have different cars?), and not when you level up your skills.



Those skills allow you to do everything from attach parachutes to other cars all the way up to dropping bombs on 'em to throwing random status effects at them to doing stuff like reverse their controls. They can do the same, but if you spend the cash (or, uh, points) to unlock a counter-move, you can disable and in some cases even bounce back attacks. It sounds pretty swanky, no? In practice, though, the skills are rarely as effective as one would hope, and require a pretty huge points investment because you can only buy something once you've revealed it on the Growth Board.



There are multiple levels to the skills that have to be purchased in order too, so if you've revealed, say, a level 3 upgrade, you'll still have to get the level 2 one first. All these skills have a set number of Skill Points that are required to slot them in your bank of available attacks, defenses, boosts and so on, and like all the other attributes, these SP limits need to be upgraded on the Growth Board. It was clearly meant to provide yet another level of progression, but because you can only purchase skills that were revealed by buying adjacent items on the Board, you'll often have to buy stuff just to "find" the necessary upgrades you're looking for.



No matter how interesting the premises might sound, they're still bolted to the core part of the game: racing, and the racing, frankly sucks. Even after hours of grinding set events to get points, I was nowhere near quick enough to win most races by pure driving alone. All this meant was a mindless series of re-races to bank cash to find the proper upgrades, and then applied them to see the smallest of actual differences in races. The controls never felt solid, the sense of speed was laughable and the framerate... oh, the framerate.



DT Carnage actually doesn't look too bad from the outset. The cars sport some limited reflections, they're typically modeled after tuned rides (though there aren't any official licensed cars), and the levels themselves are tight and confined, but sport some nice variety. The second you unleash one of the EM Pulse weapons, though, it all goes to crap, dropping the framerate into the single digits, and turning the game into a chop-fest. Get enough cars exploding or burning on screen and you'll likely be treated to a virtual slideshow.



If the audio were somehow better, it might have made things a little more tolerable, but instead the sound effects are weak, the cars aren't nearly throaty enough and the music amounted to a handful of tracks repeated until I just ended up muting the whole works.



The rest of the game's presentation -- particularly the tutorial videos that have weirdly blurry text in parts -- do more to bore than actually inform. Three bonus modes were included, but all three are lifeless; the bowling mode is hilariously basic, the Tokyo Drift-inspired garage racing parts rely on the drift-based cars' weak sliding ability and the Ghost Busters mode just highlights how boring the actual racing is. To make matters worse, the game actually has a nasty habit of completely crashing my PSP if I happen to put it to sleep while on the Growth Board. Maybe it was trying to tell me something.





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