I have yet to really play a PSP Mini that has had such a frustrating design flaw as Monochrome Racing. This is a top down racing game with its selling point being a monochrome track with 4 coloured cars to battle it out. In classic Micro Machine tradition, you must knock out your opponents and be the only one left racing on the screen either by nudging them off the screen or going so quickly they drop off the bottom of the screen and that’s it.
The design flaw? It’s over in literally five seconds.
Instead of trying to be the first to five points or something like that, it’s literally a one-off affair. The AI is nothing short of shocking. They spin in circles on the straights, fail to turn for corners and stop dead at random intervals. Admittedly there’s 84 tracks to unlock but in the fifty or so I’ve unlocked already I’ve yet to actually get round a lap of one because I’ve usually won by turn 2. Then there’s a loading screen and an awfully chunky un user-friendly menu system that takes an aeon to navigate. You actually spend more time in the menu’s than on the track!
When you’re on the track the handling is awful as well. The cars are on ice so everything slides or rather slips across the screen. It’s like watching melting butter drip off a knife and it’s just as fun! As a result of that even trying to race competitively in such small arenas is more frustrating that it ever should be and as a result you’ll put it down and go for either Rocket Racers or Super Touch Nitro Racing instead on the Mini market.
Positives
~84 tracks
Negatives
~Awful handling
~AI is so idiotic it ruins the gameplay for single and multiplayer modes
~Menu’s are difficult to navigate and there’s a loading screen every ten seconds
Conclusion
I could have tried to forgive the handling if I could actually get more than ten seconds of gameplay followed by ten seconds of loading screen. Isn’t it funny how one oversight at the basic level of game design has utterly ruined a game. Sorely disappointed, I cannot recommend this to anyone.