PACER is a game about unfulfilled potential. When it comes to AG Racers, it's really about as big as it comes - beautiful visuals, over a dozen tracks with night / day variations, ship customization, a lot of gamemodes including a career, and a massive OST of more than 80 songs featuring new songs from the original WipEout's composer CoLD SToRAGE.
The unfortunate reality though, is that it just doesn't come together nicely. The controls and physics are far too twitchy, the track design is inconsistent, the weird item pickup system does more harm than good, and just an overall lack of polish make it difficult to appreciate at times.
It's hard to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that PACER is in reality "just" a huge patch of Formula Fusion (which was not the strongest of bases to start with) with a new direction, and that's where its issues with consistency arise from.
Still, if you like WipEout it's a game that's still worth a playthrough of. It's the closest an AG Racer has come to the production values of WipEout HD, and even if it can't get close to it, it's nice to play a game in this genre that feels like it had a bit of budget put into it.
The unfortunate reality though, is that it just doesn't come together nicely. The controls and physics are far too twitchy, the track design is inconsistent, the weird item pickup system does more harm than good, and just an overall lack of polish make it difficult to appreciate at times.
It's hard to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that PACER is in reality "just" a huge patch of Formula Fusion (which was not the strongest of bases to start with) with a new direction, and that's where its issues with consistency arise from.
Still, if you like WipEout it's a game that's still worth a playthrough of. It's the closest an AG Racer has come to the production values of WipEout HD, and even if it can't get close to it, it's nice to play a game in this genre that feels like it had a bit of budget put into it.