H-Craft Championship
Review
Will racing of the future be like this?
by William Thompson
reviewed on PC
H-Craft Championship review
There are a million racing games on the market these days. To bring new gamers to your product, a new racing game must be different than the other racing games it is competing with. One such game is H-Craft Championship. HCC, the first game developed by Irrgheist (an independent game developer) is a racing game with a futuristic slant. Rather than cars, HCC uses ultramodern hovercraft-style vehicle that travel at breakneck speed.
Gentlemen, start your...fans
To best describe the look of the H-Craft vehicle, I would say they look like a spider holding onto a small cooling fan. These vehicles fly, or should I say 'float', around the tracks at great speed. There are a number of racing options to choose from including time-trials, single arcade races, ghost races (where you race against the 'ghosted' best lap and multiplayer (on the same machine) races. All these offer a nice range, but winning the Championship is what HCC is all about. The Championship involves three levels or 'seasons' of competition. Each season contains a set of twelve races, broken up into four groups of three.
Gamers start out by playing the easiest races and score points upon completion. After scoring a certain amount of points, the next set of three races become available to play. Of course, the next set of three races, are more difficult than the first three, and races get gradually more difficult.
Stay on track
After playing for a short time, one gets to realize that the main aim of the game is not just to go fast, but to stay on the track. In fact staying on the track could be said to be more important than going fast and this could become frustrating for some gamers. HCC plays like the precision of a Formula 1 race, with gamers needing to be exacting in their turns, or risk falling off the track. And when I say, falling off, I literally mean falling off the track.
As you’ll probably notice from the accompanying screenshots, HCC is set in a world where the racetracks are just that - racetracks. There is nothing else but the expanses of the universe. Falling of the tracks results in a reset of the vehicle on the racetrack positioned before the 'crash' position. This means that (a) time is taken up resetting the H-Craft and (b) the difficult section of the racetrack must be traversed again.
Luckily for drivers, the early levels of the championship are quite easy, with much of the racetracks having containing protective barriers, helping racers from falling off the edge of the tracks. But having said that, drivers must get themselves prepared for things to get more difficult, and fairly quickly. Tracks on the early levels which are largely flat surfaces with few turns, turn into undulating tracks with multiple hairpin turns and numerous slopes.
5.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
