Fast & Furious: Showdown Review

A catastrophic wreck.

→ May 24, 2013 The Fast & Furious movies are known and loved for their over-the-top pomp and insane stunt driving. It's good dumb fun, and that's the thing action games are best at. That’s why it’s such a surprising letdown that Fast & Furious: Showdown fails on practically every level to capture any of its cinematic brethren’s frantic energy and enthusiasm for lovely destruction. This feels like the bare minimum for what it takes to be a racing game. Are there cars? Yes. Is it interactive? Yes. Is it possible to complete? Yes. Is there even the slightest modicum of entertainment to be found within its soulless shell? Absolutely not.

Here's an example of how this half-assed cash-in manages to loosely reenact the films while completely sucking the life and fun out of them: an early mission recreates the thrilling bank-vault heist from the end of Fast Five, which featured Vin Diesel and Paul Walker blazing through the streets of Rio de Janiero with a massive safe tethered behind their cars. Well, that level in Showdown replaces Diesel with Ludacris’ character (apparently Diesel was smart enough to not want his likeness associated with this stinker), reduces the destructive safe to the weight of a piñata, and kills any notion of enjoyment that was contained within the film with non-existent driving physics, ridiculous collision detection, lifeless environments, and bugs around every corner.

That mission, like most of the 30 included, was mercifully over within four or five minutes. If you do the math, you come out with a completion time of roughly

two and a half hours, or three if you account for the wildly uneven difficulty that flips between patronizingly simple and stupidly difficult. Even at that length, I felt that Showdown seemed to actively try to persuade me to stop playing before I reached the finish line.

It’s almost impressive to consider how Showdown's missions transform the act of driving 200mph into a banal chore. Most involve little more than making it from point A to point B at a leisurely pace and oftentimes end in success or failure for no reason whatsoever. Some require you to man a gun with infinite ammo and simply point it toward anything that moves. The Germany missions in particular are riddled with bugs and fail-states in the form of proximity mines that act without logic. Sometimes they can be destroyed, other times they must be avoided. Then again, there were moments where the mines were simply impassable, and I’d have to restart the mission in order to circumvent the obstacle. Missions in Rio, Miami, and Hong Kong aren't much better, and certainly aren't any prettier. Presented without context, I might've mistaken Showdown for a bad budget game from a decade ago.

Hot garbage.

Continuing that downward spiral, between races there are low-budget cinematics with muddy storytelling followed by egregious load times, and the stand-in voice actors (no one from the films lend their vocal talents) rattle off their lines with no emotion whatsoever. Seeing as how Fast & Furious 6 was unreleased at the time of this review, I can’t speak to how accurately Showdown adheres to the film’s storyline – but I can say that it completely butchers events from the previous movies.

Misery loves company, so you can choose to partner up with a buddy and play through that two and a half hours cooperatively. Banding up with a fellow masochist might present the slog in a new light, in that it creates an open dialogue regarding the multitude of better ways to spend your time and money.

Showdown is at a “budget” price of $40, which is borderline-unethical for a product of such low quality and minimal content. I found absolutely zero enjoyment while playing this game, and I struggle to imagine how anybody could. It’s unintentionally poignant that an actual “hint” in the instruction booklet reads, “To remove disc, touch the eject button after quitting the game.” At least the manual seems self-aware.