Blur

Blur released in 2010 and was created by developer Bizarre Creations and was one of the last games developed by the British team before the studio closed, the other being 007 Blood Stone that we looked at last in the issue. The best way of describing Blur is a kind of “Mario Kart with real cars” but that is in no way to put the game, in fact it is unique and incredibly fun.

In single player your main focus is the Career Mode. This is split into a number of different rivals, each rival has a set of different events. These events can either be races or destruction events. You have to complete a number of challenges through those events, and you can replay them as often as you need to as your score accumulates, in order to meet the conditions to unlock the 1 on 1 event against that rival.

Each event earns you lights. For example, in the race type of event you have to place either 3rd, 2nd or 1st in order to earn lights which is harder than you think as races have 20 racers in it and you always start at the back. This is actually quite a clever feature as it means there is always a car near you that you can target with weapons and it prevents you from getting to the front by the pack by end of the first lap and then cruising until the end. The whole race is a struggle to work your way up lap by lap.

Aside from earning lights you also earn fans. You get fans by doing tricks like jumps, drifting and using weapons. Fans unlock new items but most importantly new cars.

The cars themselves have different specs and ratings including health. Some cars might be slow and handle badly but they might have lots of health and can therefore take tons of damage. They aren’t all that useful but they come up in certain situations.

I find the game runs really smoothly and holds up quite well. The graphics are aiming for mostly realistic, the damage the cars sustain is also realistic with bumpers falling off and glass getting smashed. The scenery is fine too but does suffer some of that murky green/brownish color that seems to affect a lot of PlayStation 3 games. I don’t particularly enjoy the UI graphics. They chose to go with a sort of bubble design with everything in lowercase and it definitely dates it for me, but these are only minor points.

I also really like the career mode. I think it is hard in racing games to focus your single player mode around a satisfactory progression system. It’s something that games did get better with before they ditched and went completely all in on online racing. The rival system is fun, there are plenty of challenges and items to unlock that keep it engaging.

We cannot talk about Blur and not talk about the weapons. You have a good range of power up options available and you can collect and store up to 3 at any time. You can also switch between them. This creates lots of different strategies where if you are leading the race you might want to hoard shields and bolts so you can fend off incoming attacks, and if you are behind you need some more offensive weapons. This keeps the gameplay really fun.

if you are leading the race you might want to hoard shields and bolts so you can fend off incoming attacks, and if you are behind you need some more offensive weapons. This keeps the gameplay really fun.

• Shunt - Sends a targeted, high powered attack to a vehicle
• Nitro - Gives you a big speed boost
• Mine - Drops a mine behind you
• Barge - A shockwave that moves the car in front of you out of the way
• Bolt - 3 mini shots that can also be shot backwards as a defensive maneuver
• Shield - Blocks attacks
• Repair - Repairs some damage on your car
• Shock - Creates bolts of lightning on the track for the leading cars

Sadly though the online multiplayer does not work as the servers are long gone. This also means the Platinum trophy is now unobtainable too. However, local multiplayer exists and supports up to 4 players which is pretty rare amongst the PlayStation 3 library and so definitely worth checking out if you have a group of local friends.

Blur is a really fun arcade racing game and is quite unique in the PlayStation 3 library. Typically I would say racing games don’t hold up well over time but as this is an arcade racer I think it does pretty well. It’s definitely not a must buy, especially as I have noticed its price is starting to go upwards on ebay, so keep an eye out for a good deal if this sounds like your kind of racing game.