I've been working my way through the Road Rash series over the past couple of years, and while I've had very mixed feelings on most of the games so far, this is the first one where I'm not sure why it exists.
The three Genesis games were barely playable at times but that can be chalked up to hardware limitations, and at least each installment showed some incremental improvements. The 3DO/PSX Road Rash (which I'll refer to as Road Rash '94 from now on) is my favorite in the series thus far, with good variety in track designs and great gamefeel in both the racing and the fighting. Road Rash 64 wasn't as refined but gave its players a more arcade-style sensibility, and ensured you could have fun even if you were losing by giving you a multitude of ways to create chaos and giving you small monetary rewards for doing so. Road Rash 3D, on the other hand, is a step down in quality from Road Rash '94 in almost every way, which is frankly embarrassing given that four years elapsed between the two games.
There is a strange delay on your punches and kicks which makes attacking any other racers a matter of luck. This delay carries over to the racing controls as well, and it's made worse by the fact that the controls are also hypersensitive. This meant that the line between "one degree turn" and "veer entirely off the road" became too thin to straddle as early as level 2; especially disappointing because they somehow broke the game feel that Road Rash '94 nailed so well. On top of this, even the window dressing isn't as good: there's considerably less content (and you inexplicably can't replay races you've already won), you can't interact with the other bikers between races, and the live-action cutscenes are nowhere even near as entertaining as those in Road Rash '94.
Road Rash: Jailbreak is up next for me, and I hope this game represents a minor speedbump and not the series figuratively lurching into a tunnel wall, clipping through it onto the top of a mountain and getting stuck, able to do nothing but watch as it drops from 1st to 16th place. (that totally happened to me by the way)
The three Genesis games were barely playable at times but that can be chalked up to hardware limitations, and at least each installment showed some incremental improvements. The 3DO/PSX Road Rash (which I'll refer to as Road Rash '94 from now on) is my favorite in the series thus far, with good variety in track designs and great gamefeel in both the racing and the fighting. Road Rash 64 wasn't as refined but gave its players a more arcade-style sensibility, and ensured you could have fun even if you were losing by giving you a multitude of ways to create chaos and giving you small monetary rewards for doing so. Road Rash 3D, on the other hand, is a step down in quality from Road Rash '94 in almost every way, which is frankly embarrassing given that four years elapsed between the two games.
There is a strange delay on your punches and kicks which makes attacking any other racers a matter of luck. This delay carries over to the racing controls as well, and it's made worse by the fact that the controls are also hypersensitive. This meant that the line between "one degree turn" and "veer entirely off the road" became too thin to straddle as early as level 2; especially disappointing because they somehow broke the game feel that Road Rash '94 nailed so well. On top of this, even the window dressing isn't as good: there's considerably less content (and you inexplicably can't replay races you've already won), you can't interact with the other bikers between races, and the live-action cutscenes are nowhere even near as entertaining as those in Road Rash '94.
Road Rash: Jailbreak is up next for me, and I hope this game represents a minor speedbump and not the series figuratively lurching into a tunnel wall, clipping through it onto the top of a mountain and getting stuck, able to do nothing but watch as it drops from 1st to 16th place. (that totally happened to me by the way)