Lifespeed Review (New 3DS Exclusive)

Lifespeed

    Joining a small list of New 3DS exclusives, developer Wee Man Studios looked to take advantage of the upgraded hardware to create a fast paced racing experience. While they succeeded in making a beautiful looking game that runs smoothly throughout, there are various factors holding the game back from being great.

    Upon booting up Lifespeed you’ll be faced with four modes to choose from; Story, Single Race, Championship and Rankings. It’s recommended you start with Story mode because the game does not offer any tutorials or an option to look at controls. As a matter of fact, the game doesn’t start to teach you the mechanics until after concluding the first race. Finishing each race rewards you with a bit of story presented in a comic book style and a bit more information about the different elements of the game. Ultimately I found myself wishing I could skip through the forgettable story and get back to racing, but unfortunately this isn’t possible for the first play through.

    The other modes open up some more choices that allow you to select one of ten different racers; each with their own specific attributes to suite your preferred play style. Single Race is what you’d expect, a mode that lets you pick any of the eight tracks and play it to get the best time possible. Championship mode runs you through all eight tracks awarding you points depending on how well you do in each and takes a tally at the end to determine where you place. Sadly upon completing this mode you’ll be sent back to the main option without any trophy presentation.

    Lifespeed does a few things differently than other racing games before it; mainly you’ll always be accelerating even without holding or pressing a button. Due to this I often found myself smashing into walls early on, but only when you master braking does the game really open up and start to feel good. All the tracks are essentially tubes keeping the racing field tight and really puts emphasis on keeping your speed up by limiting crashes. Throughout each track they’ll be a number of different rings you can fly through granting you boosts, weapons, energy and health. Utilizing the weapons can be the difference between finishing 1st and middle of the pack and the game encourages taking out opponents as you rack up points for doing so. Mastering controls and weapons are essential especially when you start progressing on to the higher difficulty settings and the game becomes increasingly fast paced and the competition becomes stiffer.

    Visually the game looks top notch and can stand tall with the best the 3DS can offer. The environments surrounding the tracks look great and you’ll even notice space ships flying around in the background which I thought were a nice touch. The game runs amazing and I never experienced slow down even with multiple racers firing weapons off on screen. It appeared that there is 3D present in the game however it was barely noticeable when the 3D slider was set to full however this might have been a caveat in order to keep the frame rate silky smooth. While the visuals shine, the audio lacks and ranges from monotonous to flat out bad. The music for each track is repetitive and you can unfortunately tell when the song loops. There was even one track where I was forced to turn the volume off to avoid listening to it for the remainder of the race.

    While there are a few modes to keep you busy, the omission of any sort of multiplayer is glaring. Online multiplayer or even local multiplayer would have been a huge addition and given a great reason to keep coming back to Lifespeed. Despite its great visuals and performance, it just didn’t keep me wanting to come back for more. After playing through the Story and the Championship mode once or twice I felt like I had seen all the game had to offer. Lifespeed is a nice little package that does some good and some bad, but ultimately don’t expect to sink too many hours into this one.

5.5/10

Pros – Looks great, Runs great, Interesting mechanics

Cons – Music, No Multiplayer, Lack of diversity in game modes

Hey guys this review was written by me and any comments or criticism would be greatly appreciated. Also feel free to ask any questions about the game and I'll answer them to the best of my ability.