When I decided to review Dare Devil, I thought that I should play it again to get a feel of the game again, and the simple thought of that gave me three weeks of recurring nightmares. The game sums up like this: utter shit. If you want to find out why, then read on.
The game box cover art is pretty nice, and the intro movie is cool, but don’t let that fool you. The game involves you driving around Rome, London, Tokyo, and San Francisco collecting coins before the timer runs out. You don’t ever have enough time, but this isn’t a problem since you can collect more time and speedups to make sure that you get to the end. Each of the cities have three levels, but the only differences between levels in the same city are the layout of the coins and powerups. This lazy attempt to make the game longer only makes it more repetitive and boring.
The controls of the game are a real letdown, and they are mixed in with the worst racing physics I have ever seen. Unlike most games, the hand-break in Dare Devil takes a couple of seconds to activate, meaning that you have to either press it early or crash. Because of the controls it gets fiendishly hard to get good at handling the car, which really sucks the fun out of the game.
The multiplayer games are a bit more fun since both players have the disadvantage of the bad controls. The lack of obstacles and interesting tracks make the racing boring, and the coin collecting game gets repetitive quite fast, but the bomb tag game is actually pretty fun. It involves driving around an arena and crashing into other players to pass the bomb; whoever is holding the bomb when the time expires is the loser. The mixture of bombs, crashing, and explosions make this good, and if the whole game was designed around this minigame it might be a bit better.
The sound and graphics aren’t bad; they are not excellent, but they are a lot better than the rest of the game.
Overall, Dare Devil is not that good, and I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you’re got a prisoner who you want to mentally scar for the rest of his life.
