Sideswiped Review
Sideswiped is not quite your conventional racing game. You aren’t racing for the first place trophy, or for a gold medal; you’re racing to utterly destroy the other cars. Sideswiped plays like a demolition derby in the palm of your hand, asking you to rack up points by crashing into anything unlucky enough to be on the road with you. There’s no story here, just a lot of bent bumpers, shattered glass, and even the occasional tanker truck explosion. It’s not the deepest of games and it certainly isn’t the most complex, but it is surprisingly satisfying to smash into a sports car coming around a sharp turn.
Sideswiped is a mission based game: in most cases you are earning a high score, either through destroying objects along the track, or by crashing into the cars around you. There is a difference in the points you receive for denting another car and for sending it spiraling through the air, so your aim is to completely demolish the other vehicles. It’s a fairly mindless game, but it’s also a lot of fun, and because there are different missions, it’s not the exact same objective every time. Occasionally you do need to earn first place in a standard race, and there are other imaginative objectives such as a trampoline mini-game, providing some much needed variety in this otherwise repetitive game.
Just look at the havoc you can wreck! Yes, that is a car flying through the air.
Unlike other racing games, Sideswiped does not seem to pride itself on a large library of race tracks. Instead, the same tracks are repeated over and over for each mission. After a handful of missions, the track will be altered slightly, either by driving down the track in the opposite direction or by adding or subtracting a portion of the track. Oddly enough, the game features specific locations and generic ones as well; you’ll race through New York or Las Vegas at one point, and in the next, travel through an unnamed mountain locale. However, there are several cars to buy and upgrade, and each genuinely feels different from the others. You can even buy such useful vehicles as a semi-truck or armored car–particularly effective for smashing into other drivers. It takes an awful lot of money to actually buy all cars, but it definitely helps using a more powerful vehicle on the later missions.
Two control options are available: regular button controls, or stylus controls. The former is fairly standard and works well, but the latter is simply a bad idea; it’s imprecise, awkward, and wholly ineffective. You are meant to slide forward on the touch screen to accelerate, slide left and right for turning, and pull back for breaking, but these controls are just too clunky for a fast racing game. Thankfully the game doesn’t force you to use the stylus controls, so it’s easy to ignore in favor of the more normative controls. In general, the cars are somewhat slippery when at top speed, making them hard to maneuver around sharp turns. However, since the objective is generally to cause as much mayhem as possible, the slippery movement actually benefits the demolition action.
A map on the bottom screen makes it all the more easy to hunt down and destroy other cars.
The game’s visuals are rather basic; the cars and environments are meant to look realistic, but as a result they aren’t very interesting to look at. From a technical standpoint, the graphics are good for a DS game, especially as explosions send objects flying around the track; the physics during these explosions are especially impressive. Unfortunately, the graphics do mess up occasionally, as backgrounds disappear or errors flash across the screen during busy moments. Musically, the game has almost nothing to offer–there isn’t even any driving music while you play. The only thing you’ll hear is the roar of the engine as you collide with another car at top speed.
Since Sideswiped is mission based, it’s a convenient game to pick up and play sporadically. Even when you do finish a mission, you can easily replay it for a higher score, or to earn more money to spend on your cars. Furthermore, the game makes a distinction between “clearing” a mission and “completing” a mission. The former is merely finishing a mission, while the latter means you’ve achieved a special goal, such as reaching a higher score, which earns money for your pocket. You can also hook up with friends for local multiplayer with one copy of the game, or you can go online–not to race, but to compare your high scores to others around the world. Even with these options, though, the game lacks depth, and grows repetitive quickly.
Sideswiped is not exactly a diamond in the rough, but it’s not bad for a short while. For quick bursts of gaming, Sideswiped is a nicely chaotic and frenetic racing game–it’s great to see a driving game that encourages massive car crashes and bounce-off-the-walls racing. Though the game gets tired quickly, it is a fun racing game for a quick rental.
Rating: 
