Fired Up!

There is a natural tendency for man, especially the Homo Sapiens Gamer, to try and destroy things. You might be playing a flight simulator or the best car racing simulator on the market but you'll still try to wreck stuff, destroy others and cause chaos. That's why each game that implies reckless property destruction is welcomed by hardcore gamers. Fired up! tries to do both new and old things for a console that is already up the hill. You've got the big guns and the big cars. And a game... What's the big idea?

Story

The story is just a pretext to get the game started. You might be wondering where the cutscene from the beginning of the game is. It must have been forgotten, with all the rest of the cutscenes. You'll have text to tell the story. It's simple: the great evil Republic invaded a little East European country to take its oil supplies. The Ghanaian man named Addo must have had an upset stomach while hearing about this so he grabs a car, a gun and two ladies and starts fighting against the Republic and its evil leader, the Iron Lady. Is it just me or is there a communist feeling with all this Republic talk and the Iron Lady stuff? It might just be the numerous red star symbols present throughout the game. Anyway, the game is all about shooting the Republic's men and delivering packages to the resistance boys. Addo's helps will be two women, Viktoria, the Swedish girl that graduated political science and works in international aid and peace keeping and Isabel, born in the Philippines, a driver for an oil company.

Concept

Sony has provided us with pretty large environments to explore, I mean explode. Countryside and large cities, they're all there to please the eye and provide playground for metallic vehicles, be they tanks or trucks with big guns. You'll use buggies, pickup trucks and all sorts of other vehicles to destroy the Republic's toys. There will also be some content available for download in case a buggie was too little to confront your friend that had a tank. The game is mostly a race against time. You'll have to complete tons of missions by fighting against time, accelerating and rolling while the seconds scroll.

Physics are a joke in this game, as the car flies and rolls when touching any sort of bump or pipe. The things are clear from the first menu: you have the story mode, the multiplayer mode, the obvious options and some extras. Those are downloads and two playable demos for Medievil: Resurrection and Wipeout Pure. Fired up! is not only a name but also a concept. You can trigger a Fired up ! event by shooting the patrolling trucks. This challenge is all about destroying a certain number of enemies within a time limit to unlock health and armor in that level. The limit is 60 seconds and is pretty impossible to do. I can't escape the arcade feeling that the game left me. Rotating and shiny pickups? Almost no story at all? Bad physics? This must be arcade although London Studio declared this is a vehicle combat game. Let's get this clear: this is not a simulator. OK, cars fly, there are funny floating pickups, but nevertheless, the game is fun to play.

Gameplay

Gameplay is fluid and easy to get used to. You'll be on to the controls in no time and you'll surely prefer the directional buttons instead of the annoying analog stick that does more harm to this game than good. The acceleration and brake buttons are the one we all know plus the R button to fire away. Fire what? Missiles, plasma, electro magnetic pulse charges, machine gun bullets. Tanks are really a pain sometimes and I still can't say that the AI is brilliant and a great foe to fight with. They do however have the bad habit of dying in front of you when you try to fire rockets at the tank that's trying to convert you into scrap metal.

Cars are really no challenge, disposable instantly with a few shots. You'll even be able to use turrets just by passing nearby and pressing the circle button. They pack a lot of firepower and are fun to use but they take too much time to load. You can roam the map as long as you want but when you're in the mood for doing missions, just step inside a green square and you're all set. The orange squares on the map show you the locations of things to pick up, destinations of places to defend. The red dots are enemies and the green or orange arrows point towards the locations you must reach. There will be a fun thing to do at some point during a mission.

You'll have to take pictures of some boxes that the British sent as aid for the Republic. The pictures are taken by pressing the circle button and you'll also have to protect the crates after you're done with the paparazzi acting. Taking 10 photos will get you a gold award while 8 or 6 can get you silver or bronze for the effort. All of them done within a time limit of about 2 minutes. The arsenal you have is not great and you'll have to unlock more weapons by collecting yellow scavenge tokens. For each 10 of those, you'll find cool stuff to shoot and blow your enemies with. Fired up ! doesn't intend to set your brain on fire and you'll be able to complete it in under five hours. It might be all of those time limits that shorten the lifespan of this title. In case the fact that you'll end with your wheels up scares you, don't worry, the car can shoot when reversed and it can also quickly regain stability on its four wheels. There is no problem with the aiming system because it is done automatically: just point and fire away lads, fire away!

Video

Enemy cars and your own sure fly neatly, but they're only cars! The smoke and fire effects are well done and there will be times when the flames of the killed foes will block your view. At some point, there will be some plane stuck in the ground, that I must say was drawn nicely. However, not the same can be said about the mountains... They are truly mountains... of pixels. You can change the view to first person if you want to eat dirt on a closer level. The backgrounds are pretty OK having that old fashioned eastern look of theirs and the out of town locations are well done as well.

Sound

The soundtrack is...there (I think). Let's call it decent and close the topic as the way the weapons sound makes up for the boring music. The crashes, booms and bangs will accompany the many ka-booms you'll trigger by using your bad temper and the finest weapons you'll find.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer saves the day for this game and I mean it. There are some people out there that would have really hated the game if it wouldn't have had a multiplayer. And we're talking about gamers giving it ratings of 4 without that option. Those evil people... Connect by using the wi-fi, all 8 of you, one big happy car-ramming family. Compete in Deathmatch Mode, Tournament Mode, Capture the flag, King of the hill. Anyway, this is way better than Story Mode and it's highly entertaining. The players will race around and blow themselves up in locations like Arctic, Quarry or Mayan.

Conclusion

This game is clearly done for a quick multiplayer session with your buddies. The single play has repetitive gameplay and you'll get bored in about two hours. I must admit that this game is no shining star, but who can pull out rabbits from the hat all the time? At least, the game is fun and that makes up for the boring gameplay and bad sound. With the proper touch here and there, maybe we'll see a sequel that won't make us regret that we gave this game a chance or even make it a hit.