Split/Second is a hard game to recommend. I do, but only barely. While the game itself is a great, unique spin on the destruction racer, it’s held back both by an annoyingly stubborn difficulty, and most importantly by the disappointing quality of the PC Port.
Framed as a playable reality TV racing competition, the game’s standout feature is its destructible stages. As opposed to other racers like Burnout or Flatout where you use your car to take down opponents, Split/Second is about using power plays to set off varying traps placed throughout the track. The player can use them to their advantage, but so can the AI opponents.
You can be sure that they’ll never let you forget it either, because while Split/Second is beatable, it also has a difficulty that can be most charitably described as “stubborn.” Between the aggressive rubber banding of the AI and how easy it is to lose control of your car to power plays, the feeling of playing the game often becomes like being a crab in a bucket. Most of wins that you get will feel like they were won by the skin of your teeth. It’s up to you whether that’s worth the times when the AI will steal a win from you at the last corner, despite it feeling like you did nothing wrong for the entire race.
If the game being annoyingly hard were the only sour point I had against it, I’d still consider the game worth a solid recommendation. However, this version of the game really doesn’t meet the standard of quality that most would expect in modern PC releases.
The game is locked to 30fps, inescapably shackling the game to 2010’s standards. Yeah, there are mods out there to force the game to run at 60, but doing that cause the game to break because the game’s logic is still tied to running at 30fps. You can use Lossless Scaling to fake 60fps, but it will never be as smooth and responsive as a true 60fps. In the end, you can only pick your poison. A glitchy 60fps, a blurry, laggy 60fps or a stable, fully working 30fps.
On top of that, the gamepad support is subpar. You can’t use your gamepad to navigate the game’s UI, only for the races themselves. The game doesn’t even recognize the gamepad at launch, which means you’ll have to do the introductory tutorial race with a keyboard. That, or quit the race, go setup your controls and then go into the extras menu to restart the tutorial. It’s sloppy.
Using a combination of the in-game control settings and Steam Input, I was eventually able to cobble together a control setup that works, but realistically I know most people would not be willing to put up with that much of a hassle. If you are, then more power to you but I feel like many would be better off playing the game on an Xbox or PS3, or using an emulator.
It’s absolutely not the sort of game that you can kick back and relax to, but when you lock in, grit your teeth through the entire city exploding around you like a disaster movie, and somehow, against all odds take the checkered flag, it can feel great.
In the end, the question with Split/Second on PC isn’t if it’s a good game or not. The question is, how many hoops are you willing to jump through to get to it?
Mehcommended.
