Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
The TOCA Race Driver series has always lurked somewhere at the front of the pack in the racing genre, but it has never quite broken into the top places dominated by the big names such as Gran Turismo and Project Gotham Racing.
The series is now going through something of a reinvention and, along with the TOCA prefix, on the DS it seems to have lost any pretensions of being a driving simulator.
Though the main game clearly doesn’t have the graphical sheen of most of the console driving games of the past two or three years, it is presented with visuals that give the feel of a serious racer. From the grounded car design through to the sombre landscapes, it has none of the gaudy excess of Mario and his rival kart racers. That is no complaint though, as the graphics of the alpha build played were more than competent. Rather than possessing the photocopied feel that many direct ports to DS suffer from, Race Driver has a sharpness and quality that shows how much better original productions look on Nintendo’s handheld.
Despite these ambitions of visual realism, the handling physics and control scheme are generous and immediate. The courses will no doubt become more trying as you advance, but from my time on the game it was fairly easy to keep up with your rivals and make corners without hours of experience or in-game driving lessons.
This is no arcade romp with Hollywood handling or arcade skids that you can ride round corners like a wave, but it certainly seems to focus on the fun side of throwing a steel box around a concrete loop.
Moving away from the gameplay for a moment, the other major part of Race Driver on the DS is of course the creative element alluded to in the title. Level design tools do not warrant particular attention these days, but on the DS they are rare, and on a driving game for the handheld they are virtually unheard of.
Outside of the PC game modding scene, allowing users to meddle with the game they have purchased usually only serves to prove that game design is best left to the professionals. In an attempt to avoid this, the team behind Race Driver have combined a basic tool with some very nifty AI, which means that in theory your rival vehicles will adapt dynamically to each track you create, with each car picking its own route every race rather than locking onto a prescribed route dictated as you construct your course.
It was not clear how much scope for size the track making tool allows for, but with the famously enormous Nuremburg Ring featuring as one of the raceways preloaded onto the cartridge, we can only hope that similarly massive creations are possible.
Unlike the main game, the system for building your own strips of tarmac uses the stylus, either giving you the chance to draw the bends and straights directly, or click together a Scalextric style set of pieces. You can add in all sorts of scenery elements, from grandstands to vegetation, and if it really is as good as Codemasters says, it will at least add longevity to the title if nothing else.
Featuring 25 real-world cars and 32 tracks to tackle from Silverstone to Bathurst, it should certainly make for a sizeable challenge on the DS regardless of the customisation tools. A selection of separate individual challenges will also be included as an alternative to the standard racing, though at the time of writing more details on these mini-games is unavailable.
The game takes full advantage of both cartridge sharing and the DS’s wi-fi internet connectivity, allowing for multiplayer races both on the 32 tracks included and on the tracks you can create, with online world leaderboards to encourage more dedicated competition.
On the whole, it looks like the only format starved of racers is about to receive one of its best to date. Race Driver: Create and Race will bring little to driving games as a genre, but on the system of choice for dedicated gamers, its imminent arrival is an appealing prospect. It might not trump the mighty Mario Kart, but it looks like it’s going to have a good go.
