Review by: Mitch Dyer

Until the dying moments of your final lap, Split Second is barely a racing game. The only time your placement matters is the instant before crossing the finish line. Before that, you’re either an attacker or you’re cannon fodder. Because you can trigger explosions with the press of a button, everything leading up to the home stretch is about surviving rather than winning. At any moment, an opponent’s incidental attack can throw you from first to last, or you can make a killer comeback from the back of the pack. It’s Russian Roulette with wheels.

This is the sum of two things. First, the good news. Split Second encourages taking the top spot by screwing your opponents over, and this stems from a simple, interesting element that gives it a unique appeal. As you drift, draft and jump across the simple yet well-designed tracks, you build power. Once you’ve accrued enough, you trigger scripted events littered throughout the course. Sometimes your trigger is as simple as an exploding truck, other times you ruin a perfectly good city setting by toppling skyscrapers or imploding bridges.

This fantastic little touch has two effects. At first I just earned-and-burned, blowing gas stations, and nearby opponents, to bits as quickly and as often as possible. As I learned the ins and outs of each course, though, I learned to time my attacks so that activating a wrecking ball took out two or more racers at a time. Bigger batches of power, however, affect the environment in radically different ways. Detonating top-tier “power plays” often opens new paths, or closes old ones. One of my personal favorites involves skipping regular roads in favor of, wait for it, flying onto an aircraft carrier.

Destroying your opponents isn’t a new addition to the racing genre by any stretch, but Split Second handles it in a slick and interesting new way. I worried that power plays wouldn’t be much more than a one trick pony, yet each track harbors enough interesting attacks that I still found new attacks, or interesting ways to use favorites, after six straight hours of racing. Alternate paths even have their own destructible materials.

Alright, the second part of our sum is the bad news: The rubber banding in Split Second is ridiculous. A.I. opponents close huge gaps instantaneously, particularly in the latter half of the career. I’ve had races where I dominated the first place position, only to have my eight second lead turn into a loss in the blink of an eye. With the smooth-looking HUD limited to a couple neon bars below your bumper, there’s no map to keep an eye on your lead, so who knows what those tricky opponents are up to when you’re not looking? This poses such a problem that I eventually stopped using power play attacks altogether during my first lap. It just didn’t make sense if they could overtake me immediately after respawning.