Jet Car Stunts

Written by Nathan Carter on 11/26/2014 for Vita  

Look, I understand that trial and error is part of videogames, but it has to be fun. You have to want to do better, to have learned from your mistakes, to feel a great sense of achievement after completing that obstacle or challenge. Jet Car Stunts offers non of that. It offers nothing but frustration and anger. It made me want to smash by PS Vita into the ground and watch it smash into a million pieces like your jet car does after you crash over and over again.

Jet Car Stunts seems simple enough. Make it to the end of each stage. The gimmick in Jet Car Stunts is that your vehicle comes equipped with a turbo boost which will help you make those long jumps and you also get an air break to help you slow down. The boost and break are very important as you will need to hit each jump at just the right amount of speed in order to safely land on the other side. Go too fast and you will fly off the stage forcing you to start over at the beginning of the level or the last checkpoint you made it through. Again, the premise seems simple enough but this game is anything but simple. The problem comes from the fact that there is absolutely no room for any error. One tiny misstep and you will find yourself restarting over and over and over and over again. All of the tracks are suspended in the sky. Drive too fast, you fly off the track or smash into a wall. One time I hit a jump at a slight angle, just barely tap the thumbstick to try and correct myself, and before I know it, the car is barrel rolling to it's doom. My frustration only grew when I thought the game kept crashing on me. I painfully managed to make my way to the end of a track, fly off the track and all of a sudden I am booted back to the main menu. I had no idea what was going on until I realized you only get ten tries to finish a level until you "fail" and are forced to do the entire track all over again. This is the kind of stuff that makes me instantly shut on my console or handheld and never want to touch it again. 

Then there is the camera. Oh god the camera is terrible. You accidentally knick an obstacle or a wall and the camera starts having a seizure, glitching all over the place and made me want to vomit. I actually found my self getting motion sickness watching the camera and the screen fly all over the place before I was reset. Again, this is a huge problem because usually in games like this you at least get a chance to try to correct yourself, but not here. Another big problem is with the tracks themselves. A lot of them just seem like a random mishmash of random obstacles and I was having horrible flashbacks of Motorbike while playing this game. It's almost like these tracks were created just to make you fail and not to provide any real challenge at all. Just when you feel like you may have mastered a track, something stupid causes your to start the entire track all over again. Whether it's the fact that you went too fast, went too slow, hit a ramp too fast, shifted the car too much in the air, ran out of fuel, flew off the track, and I could go on and on and on. One thing I do give them credit for is that you can compete against ghost players which is a feature I always enjoy about racing games. Unfortunately, there really isn't any way to pick what ghost you will be playing against. I seems that a random one will just drop in whenever you start a race. In fact I'm not even sure if it's a random ghost or whomever is the person at the top of the leaderboards. 

Aside from the main game mode, there are also time trials and collector mode which is even more difficult. Time trials is exactly what you would expect. Finish each track in the quickest time possible. Challenge mode on the other hand is a whole new level of frustration. Making sure that you don't fly off the track or crash is a task in itself, but in Collector mode, you have to pick up stars on the track. I found that this was damn near impossible to accomplish. It is just too frustrating trying to navigate each level, never mind picking up stars along the way. If you are so inclined you can always check how you stack up against other players on the leaderboards and like I mentioned aboge, if you are connected to the internet you can play against ghost racers. Even though I do like the idea of ghost racers, this game just isn't fun and I really wouldn't have any reason to keep playing.  

The game itself really isn't great to look at either. The graphics look like they are passable for a Playstation One game, and entire levels just looks filled with a cluster of pointless and random blocks and shapes hanging above you. Some of these are used as obstacles, but I would wonder where most of them would even come into play. As for the sound, well there is barely any. There is no music at all in the game and the only sound effects you will listen to are the sounds of the "3, 2, 1, go" alert at the beginning and the car engine which sounds like it was ripped from an early 1980's arcade game. 

To me, this game just isn't fun. It's just a mishmash of random track design, frustration and unfair difficulty. Sadly, I cannot recommend this game to anyone where there are much better games of the same genre out there. The PS Vita is great for indie titles but this isn't one that you need to waste the small space on your memory stick for.