Blur Review

Vehicle choices range from bulky monster trucks with huge energy bars to sleek sporty numbers, high on speed if somewhat fragile.

Perhaps it’s through it’s pairing with the immensely satisfying multiplayer experience, but Blur’s single player career fails to excite as much as it should, and that’s not through lack of diversity or tasks, as it regularly throws you shopping lists of secondary goals to earn bonus fans or sticker challenges. The lack of mods in single player reduces the your options to a rudimentary level once you’ve become accustomed to the depth of multiplayer strategy, and with this AI, you could really use the defensive help. The AI can be a spiteful bastard at the best of times, but when it really goes for the jugular, you will drop from first to last, and that’s the end of it. It’s by no means impossible, but it can feel frustratingly unfair.

Even during the most crowded of multiplayer matches, the experience is seamless and lag-free.

In their attempts to engage the community, Bizarre have come up with some novel approaches to get players talking to each other. When grinding your opponents into the asphalt isn’t satisfaction enough, you can gloat about your proficiency via Facebook or Twitter with the touch of a button, keeping your friends updated on every challenge that falls before you. If you do manage to exhaust the game’s truly extensive range of challenges, the friend challenge puts the creativity in your hands as you tailor the specifics of a test to send to friends. Both of these options are of course dependent on building rivalries and pushing one another forward, and only time will tell how much players appreciate these tools, but their inclusion undoubtedly shows a degree of thought has gone into building the community.

They may shoot lasers and summons thunder from the skies, but the cars are still authentically modeled from a variety of real-world manufacturers.

Blur’s visuals don’t quite pack the punch of some of its more showboating rivals, and with the intensity of the 20 player pile-ups, that could just as well be a design choice as a technical shortcoming but it’s still a very pleasing game to look at, and while the audio work stands out (the aural response of grit hitting your chassis is superb), the decision to licence a great soundtrack only to leave it turned off by default is puzzling.

Yes, Blur has borrowed ideas, but it has assembled them with great care, expanding and improving on them in many cases. In cramming in such an enormous breadth of content, it’s evolved into its own wholly relevant and highly compelling experience that transcends the ever-so-slightly incongruous art direction through keen balance, rewarding structure, and most significantly, sheer brute enjoyment.