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Preview  Bonx Racing
- By Nathaniel Walker
If Disney’s TRON, Marble Madness, and your Grandma’s oatmeal cookies were somehow spliced into one entity, and that entity was not a hideous monster but actually a pretty cute little Gameboy Advance game, that game would be called BONX RACERS. What on earth do I mean, you ask? Good question. What I mean to say is that BONX RACERS is one of the most unique games I have yet run across—and yet its bizzare traits contain within them that grain of familiarity that keeps this future release approachable.
Ubi Soft, the same brilliant company that brought us the delightfully potent RAYMAN, has put its collective French Canadian creativity to the task of bringing us a new racing/platform/puzzle game of authentic different-ness and great gameplay potential. The graphics are decidedly oldschool (thus the TRON reference) in that they are made up of blocks and sticks—almost more reminiscent of a Speak ‘n’ Spell than any older gaming platforms—but the mechanics are definitely innovative and volumes of gameplay value could be stashed in what looks like a complicated game gone madly simple.
Here’s the scoop: you are a block, specifically one of the BONX, and you have places to go. Perhaps this is what videogames would have looked like if human civilization had skipped the invention of the bothersome wheel and gone straight to semiconductors. Regardless, you are a block and the race is on. Now, it is one thing to slide around flat, even surfaces—anyone can do that. It is quite another to go up or down stairs when all you have to work with are right angles (not to mention the annoying tendency to remain absolutely motionless). You will have to utilize your ability to alter your height, to build upon yourself, if getting from Point A to Point B is going to happen. This is where BONX RACERS gets truly unique: the methods by which BONX shuffle about are to my knowledge unprecedented, yet they do not look like they will take a great deal of getting used to. That is a hard combination to cook up, but I have faith that Ubi Soft will make it work. The way these li’l BONX bully themselves up stairs strikes me as awfully sweet.
Of course, part of being in a block race is racing other blocks. There will be other BONX against which to pit your skills. And the multiplayer potential definitely seems to have been tapped here, as up to four blocks can go head-to-head via the Gameboy Advance Link.
On a different note, what is a quirky character racing game without powerups of some form or another? BONX RACERS seems to have pulled through in this department, as well—so instead of being a boring old “plain block” with no options other than doing your very best to win, you have the option of becoming a “shielded missile-launching block”, with all the devilish advantages that would imply! And the powerups don’t even begin to stop there. Throughout the boards you will find special zones that make your tools even more powerful. Whether this feature will prompt players to save their goodies to the point of rendering them useless, or simply add to the delightful chaos, remains to be seen.
Now, as we all know, blocks don’t have much in the way of natural enemies. Judging by the precedents set with the Great White Shark and the Killer Whale, it might be assumed that Humankind is the block’s only competitor. But we will never know, because there are no humans in this game. One must only try to avoid fictional enemies of the Block Kind, like birdy-blocky-eating things and probably other bad things (Special Note: my obvious inability to describe this game is a testament to its ingenuity. Please, even if you don’t buy it, borrow a copy, look at it and ponder upon it. Even if you don’t love it, you’ll probably hate it enough to make it entertaining). There are Aliens, of course, but figuring out exactly what qualifies as “alien” in a world dominated by fragmented Rubix Cubes is beyond the reaches of even my imagination.
Eighteen boards in nine distinct worlds will take your naughty little BONX underwater, through computerized landscapes, and into urban wastelands the likes of which few blocks have ever emerged unscathed. This game truly looks promising, and at the very least it will be worth a chuckle or two. And for those of us who have for all of our lives secretly dreamed of being a block and warping ourselves up stairs, BONX RACERS is a dream come true. I suppose there is a chance that the quirkiness will not pay off in terms of control scematics or play depth, but for some reason I have faith in this little bugger. Maybe it’s because the graphics are so down-to-earth and minimalistic—I find it hard to believe that Ubi Soft would release a product like this unless it had a selling point that goes deeper than eye candy. And those little BONX would definitely make for cool T-shirts! That, at least, is for sure. Look for the game later this month, for the Gameboy Advance.
- 10.29.2001 |
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