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The PSP is home to a number of excellent racing games, including the stunning Ridge Racer and extreme speed racer WipEout Pure. It’s also received a fairly successful entry in the long-running aerial combat series Ace Combat. But what about players who have been longing for a mixture of the two? Where is the aerial combat racing game? OK, perhaps it’s not a question many people have been asking, but with M.A.C.H. Kuju Entertainment is attempting to combine the two genres.
M.A.C.H. sees you piloting numerous ultra fast jets, with the top end craft capable of reaching 1300 mph. It’s a fast game but the early planes ease you into it gradually. Working through the game’s main career mode earns you money and this lets you access new planes and new upgrades. You might not notice the increases in speed, but by the end the speed you were flying at the start of the game seems completely pedestrian.
Being planes, not hovercrafts or cars, you have far more freedom of movement. While each course is marked as you’d expect, you have options all the time. You can go above or below obstacles, through or around tight gaps, or smack bang into a cliff face. In most racing games there’s a clear racing line but in M.A.C.H. things are far less clear cut. There might be a blatant short cut over a low-lying mountain, but it avoids the power-up that would have been yours a few hundred metres down the pre-set route, thus putting you at the mercy of whoever is in pursuit.
Things aren’t that simple though. To reward the more daring pilots, each plane has a M.A.C.H. power bar. Fly low to the floor and generally be a bit of a daredevil and this meter will fill up. Its most basic use is as a turbo, propelling your plane to an even more ridiculous speed, but it also acts as a way to get out of a tight spot involving a homing missile. These are top of the range planes so missile warning systems are part and parcel – if another racer decides to target you and fire off a missile, you’ll be told about it. If you time it right and have enough M.A.C.H. power you’re able to barrel roll, dodging the missile and saving your skin.
Successful racing games require more than weapons and fancy evasion manoeuvres, and thankfully M.A.C.H. has that in the form of the Extreme turn. By holding ‘Square’ while screaming along at high speed, you can carve through the air with much more control. It also prevents you from slowing down too much to take corners, acting as a powerslide would in a traditional racing game. If you happen to see a member of the development team playing, it looks remarkably simple but it’s far from it.
Not content with just racing, a dog fighting mode has also been included. While more in keeping with what you’d expect from an aerial combat game, it still has a distinct arcade feel. Power-ups and weapon pick-ups litter the arenas (each themed around the locations seen during races), while the M.A.C.H. meter functions as it does during racing. This means you have the same access to turbos but also, and more importantly, barrel rolls. The Challenge mode adds even more to the single-player experience, throwing set tasks at you while also giving you a chance to pilot some of the more advanced planes that you won’t own until later on.
As much fun as the single-player game seems to be, it’s multiplayer where things really get interesting. Playable with eight players in race or dogfight mode, and with support for game sharing, there are few PSP games that match M.A.C.H.’s multiplayer credentials. Dog fights especially seem to reach completely new levels of fun when you’re targeting real players and those barrel rolls aren’t so nifty when Player 2 fires off three missiles in quick succession. Most importantly, it’s great fun and makes good use of the PSP feature set.
M.A.C.H. is set for release exclusively for the PSP on March 9 and if first impressions are anything to go by, it’s a racer all PSP owners should have an eye on. It might not be a well-known franchise but it’s got all the ingredients of a must-own PSP arcade racer.
For more on M.A.C.H. check out our exclusive developer interview.
