Corvette Evolution GT [DS]

Corvette Evolution GT has all the makings of a really good Nintendo DS racing game. The action's fast with some impressive course designs and a nice assortment of licensed vehicles from GM, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and others. It even has single cartridge multiplayer support so that gamers can get in some four player competition without buying multiple copies. But what's gotten in the way is a distinct lack of polish to put it all together. It's a budget title, and it doesn't hide it.

The game, developed by Island Racing Studios, borrows on the PlayStation 2 game of the same name but doesn't base itself on it. Instead, it's just a straight-forward arcade racing game featuring real-life cars in looks but not in performance; think Ridge Racer without a big time developer backing the design.

And for a small-time developed game on a small budget, it doesn't handle all that bad: steering is tight and responsive and track designs are – with the exception of some poor choice of guardrail positions – impressively laid out. The game looks fine and runs smoothly, but let's be frank: it suffers from glitches that are hard to ignore. Some are minor, like lighting and texture detail pop-in when more than a few cars appear on screen, but some severe issues occasionally show up: watch in awe as the vehicles disappear from the screen altogether for a split second.

But the real killer is the game's lack of focus in computer AI routines. Corvette Evolution GT features four different levels of difficulty, but that difficulty is applied to the aggressiveness of the computer opponents, or rather, their aggressiveness of getting back into the track's "groove." See, the computer controlled cars follow the line of the course so rigidly that you'll see all the cars get into a strict "follow the leader" conga line and rarely make the opportunities to pass. When they do deviate from the path it's because they were bumped out of position for a bit. When you up the difficulty, you up the "pushyness" of the AI cars when they try to get back in line…and it's amazing to see that you'll actually distance yourself from the pack faster and further in the high difficulty settings because the computer cars are too busy shoving each other around and slowing themselves down.

In other words, harder is easier. Funny how that works.

The single player campaign is also a bit weak since you're forced to drive a specific car on each cup's race, and you're required to play through all of the dull "easy" challenges before you can jump into something a bit more challenging. But as I said above, more aggressive computer opponents doesn't equal a more challenging experience, so the single player options aren't that fulfilling. Multiplayer's a bit better thanks to the single cartridge option thrown in there, but without any fanfare after the race it's all a bit flat.

Closing Comments
Corvette: Evolution is not a terrible game: I’ve played truly awful racing games on the Nintendo DS and this isn't one of them. It's simply a design whose quality doesn’t match up with the sum of its parts. It's definitely a game with the right ingredients, but apparently the money ran out before the cake finished baking.

©2008-05-02, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved