Smashing Drive Critic Reviews

Short, mindless fun.

The graphics are pretty subpar and there's not much game here, but it's a total blast while it lasts.

Being an arcade game, however, fun isn't the problem with Smashing Drive – it's the lack of replay.

It's not innovative, it's not a sequel and the graphics are below the quality of "Crazy Taxi," a driving game that's nearly four years old.

It's essentially a one-trick pony -- short, fast, fun, and to the point, just like a good arcade experience should be, but not exactly what gamers hungry to spend $50 will call filling.

All the alternate routes in SD make the game highly replayable, there are still only a handful of tracks that add up to a total estimated playing time of oh, let’s say…15 minutes before you’ve seen just about everything.

You can see everything the game has to offer in an hour or two, and similarly, the two-player split-screen mode gets boring very quickly.

The title’s sub-par graphics and limited options don’t make it a must-have, but the mindless action is fun for short periods of time.

Despite the chaos you can create, everything happens at the same time for the same reasons. There will always be a cop car with its lights on at this corner; that boat will always be there at this time, etc.

Just reviewing this game has proven to be an agonizing experience.

What should be an adrenaline-filled journey through busy city streets ends up being a dull ride, which is hard to believe given the exciting premise.

Everything about Smashing Drive smacks of laziness.

Its extremely short life span, accompanied by its lukewarm presentation, ensures that few players will get more than a couple of hours' worth of enjoyment out of the home version.

If there was actually a sense that Smashing Drive modeled the rubber meeting the road, it might have been interesting.

It's just so shallow and lacking any kind of noticeable depth.

Smashing Drive also takes the prize for what maybe the worst soundtrack in the history of videogames. No, this is not an exaggeration.

A soundtrack so preposterous I forgot the Mazda zoom-zoom jingle for almost a full minute.

It's got graphics befitting of the N64, bizarre music that’s a mish-mash of different styles and horribly shallow, agonizingly repetitive gameplay that makes playing the game for five minutes seem like five hours.