Comrades! Muscovites! Country-proletariat! Lend me your cursors! Now is the time to prove that you are more equal than others!
Our dear frozen-dessert-in-arms Ice Cream Breakfast has released Racing Comrade for the demonstration of your socialist prowess! You must sprint, kick, and bribe your way to athletic glory! Refusal to use exclamation points is counterrevolutionary!
The game is entirely mouse controlled. What you can do in a race depends completely on what upgrade you've purchased. At first, you're limited to some basic improvements, like faster running and the ability to salute the officials. But sign a minor contract (and don't bother reading it, I mean, what could go wrong?), and you'll unlock a number of more devious upgrades, such as contraband to collect on the race course and the ability to kick, bite, taunt, and even shiv your competitors. Within the race itself, you'll have various action buttons which reload over time and can affect each other. You won't be able to sprint for a while while you're catching your breath, and biting your opponent will delay your ability to kick them. Most of these actions also cost stamina, which is measured in a bar at the left side of the screen. Lastly, the weather affects the outcome of the race. In the fog, for instance, everyone goes slower, but you'll slowly recover stamina as you run, and officials won't be able to see anything you do, good or bad.
Analysis: Racing Comrade takes a refreshingly detached approach to the racing genre. The developer claims inspiration from the fighting in World of Warcraft. Rather than requiring you to hammer away at arrow keys, your little Lenin-headed racer just plugs along while you wait for the opportunity to make him take some special action. It winds up making you feel more like a coach or even a puppeteer. The reloading periods for actions are sufficiently long that you never feel too rushed or frantic, and in fact, the game could almost be called relaxing. The repetitive propaganda music playing in the background certainly has a hypnotic effect on me.
The game's art and humor have a Pythonesque quality; the floating Marx heads in the clouds which serve as the game's officials could indeed have dropped directly out of a Terry Gilliam sketch. Your Lenin character is racing against numerous other historical figures cut and pasted over figures in skimpy running shorts. If you lose the race, the winner offers up some appropriate remark, such as Comrade Franklin suggesting you blame Hoover and Comrade Hegel suggesting the result was historically inevitable.
This turns out to be a game that is almost as good of an idea as the developer's handle, Ice Cream Breakfast. Grab a bowl of rocky road or double chocolate chip some morning and double your pleasure and/or fun by accompanying it with this game.
Walkthrough Guide
(Please allow page to fully load for spoiler tags to be functional.)
Racing Comrade Tips and Tricks:
Like most games of this kind, if you just keep plugging away, you'll eventually earn enough cash to buy enough upgrades that you can't help but overwhelm your opponents. But if you want to speed things up, here are my tips.
The "game-breaker" ability (and it's intended to be so) is the shiv. Shivving permanently removes an opponent. Therefore, all the shivving-related abilities are most important to buy, and shivving is the most important thing you can do. Shiv whenever you have the opportunity. Send the officials away if necessary.
Remember that you have to be in range to use biting, kicking and shivving. Look at the top of the screen at the view of the racecourse to see how close you are to someone, since the front view can be hard to tell.
Mind the weather, particularly fog, when choosing your actions.
You may be familiar with some other upgrading games where you can save money by buying several levels of a skill at once, eg level five costs 600 gold and level 4 costs 400 gold, but you can buy level 5 without having first bought level 4 and save 400. Racing Comrade isn't like that. Previous money invested in a skill is deducted from the price of upgrading. So don't be afraid to put money into upgrades right away.
All contraband is outlined in red. Make sure you don't pick it up if officials are likely to see. And remember to sell it in between races. You unlock new kinds of contraband with the "underground connections" upgrade.
In the final race, you have so many competitors that the "donation" action, which causes all other competitors to pause, becomes almost as useful as the shiv. Its major weakness is that the officials have to be both there and able to see you.
The last ability to be used in conjunction with the shiv is the taunt. Particularly use taunt at the beginnings of a race when you have a lot of competitors to keep them back with you while your shiv ability reloads.
Posted by: joye
|
June 30, 2011 2:44 PM