Jet Moto reviewed @ www.vidgames.com

Jet Moto
PlayStation Review by Nils Jacobsen

Booting up...

The first thing you'll notice when you boot this game is the high resolution graphics in the menus. Looks excellent! In the Options Menu there are various settings available, including the choice of number of laps in each race, ranging from 2 to 6, you can disable/enable grappling, turbo, cinematic camera, turbo etc. Controller setup looks very nice, cool drawing of the PlayStation controller. In sound setup you can change the effects and music volume, and the overall volume. You can even choose the sex of the person presenting you with the trophy, should you win. There are three difficulty settings.

Getting started...

When starting a game, you choose between one player or head-to-head racing. You then choose a rider from the 20 different available. They are divided into 4 different teams, all with different characteristics in handling, acceleration, mass and lift. One team is all female. :-)

Next you choose if you want to race a Single Race, Custom Circuit, Full Season or just Practice. In Custom Circuit you choose Rally, Championship or Elimination mode, then which of the circuits you want to include.

OK, the game now loads. While doing so a map of the track is displayed. This is a very smooth and clever way to load the game. You look at the map, trying to find the best route for the race and while you are still looking at the map, the little loading sign in the lower right corner changes from "Loading" to "Press X to continue". Once you see the X, Boom!, you're in the race.

Gameplay

Wow! What a crowd! 20 bikes on the track! You always start in the last row, even if you won the previous race. Oh well, no biggie. Racing is great fun. With so many people on the track it is a riot trying to get to the front. You hit other bikes, they hit you. People flying left and right. Falling off the bike can be a spectacular view as you might fly 40-50 feet through the air. In tight turns the Magnetic Grapple Post can help tremendously, in fact, mastering the grappling is a key to winning the race. When you approach a corner you hit the grapple button, and a pink "grapple beam" pull you around the corner. Timing is critical, or you'll either loose a lot of speed or hit the race boundary. When you ride the waves you can tip the bike forward or backward for max performance. In each lap you have four Turbo Boosts available, use them wisely.

There are a total of 10 tracks available, 3 of which are available from start. The next four become available when you beat the first three in the Intermediate mode. Then four more are made available, all more difficult than the first three. Then, after more racing, you can make the last three, really hard tracks, available. You get points for each game, and it is the total number of points that count, so you don't have to win every race to win the overall victory. Should you win on the Professional level a cool stunt mode becomes available with a few goodies. Although you can still do stunts during normal gameplay. Backward or sideways loops are quite easy to make, even causing the crowd to applause. The first three tracks are:

Joyride. A tropical setting, racing on water, sand dunes and part of a highway coming out of the ocean water. Easy track, shouldn't be much of a challenge.
Blackwater Falls. Yikes! Quite a bit harder than the first one. Race through swamps, down a huge waterfall and up a dam. Sharp turns and trees all over the place. Takes some practice!
Suicide Swamp. No kidding! You race one way, dodging trees and other obstacles, do a sharp 180, and race back the same way. Watch out, coming through!! Some cool, yet frustrating collisions will result! Coming back there is another 180, and you keep going back and forth. Turbo is the key for success.

Once you beat the Full Season, you'll be given access to four more tracks. (Remember to save the game when you've won!) Luckily, you don't have to win every race to win the season. And even better, there isn't one racer that wins every time, so you have a fighting chance even if you're doing a mistake here and there. The four new tracks are:

Cliff Diver. A beautiful, but hard track. You wind yourself up a mountain in very tight hairpins, only to go through the same process on the way down, this time without as many "grapple sticks"... A short stretch on the water, keep left....
Hammer Head. Similar in concept to Suicide Swamp. A bridge stretches along the track, with multiple missing sections, and added onramps. At each end there is a U-turn, causing havoc every time. The missing sections makes head-on collisions quite frequent...
Cypress Run. Seems really difficult to begin with, but turns out to be a really fast track. Keep to the sides in the swamp area and you'll stay out of trouble. Again, some hairpin turns test your grappling skills. Not enough turbos to keep you going...
Ice Crusher. Yikes! This is one heck of a cool track, even has excellent music. The track is carved out of a glacier, consisting entirely of huge blocks. Enourmous climbs and huge drops. You go over the edge, and you're history. Well, not quite, you're put back on the track, but you lose a lot of time. Excellent design!

It took a while to qualify for these levels, but unlocking the next three (two of which you see in the demo) seems almost impossible. Nope, this game won't get boring over night!

Graphics/Sound/Music

As mentioned, the menus are stunning. Why didn't anyone do this before? The game graphics are good. The water affects don't come close to Waveracer 64, but you won't mind. There are too many other things going on to worry about. The water reflection when racing the last two tracks is great. All the landscape is reflected in the water. Haven't noticed any pop-up or slowdown worth mentioning.

Music is OK, although not quite at the Warhawk level, although some of the later levels have excellent tunes. Sound effects are good, thump, thud, scream, and the ever present humming from the bike.

Conclusion

Another great game from Singletrac Entertainment. You'll spend hours on this game mastering the ride and unlocking more tracks. You'll get frustrated here and there when you biff it, and 15 racers whiz by you before you're back on the track, but keep trying. The two player mode adds extra excitement, although only the two of you are on the track. A great feature is that you can choose between horizontal or vertical split screen for each race. Great handling of the bike, great graphics. good sound effects and lots of challenges all add up to a winner game! Try it!