IHRA Drag Racing Review

The visuals are not particularly striking. We've seen a lot better object and background rendering in other car racing games. The graphic settings can be applied to your desires in the Settings Menu; sadly even if you set maximum effects on everything the game still looks crappy. Details of the environment and the animations in general need a lot more work - the spectators look more like paper cutouts than ordinary people (Hey, that's 2D pixels for ya - Ed). Weather conditions are not very visually impressive, for example you will find that there's no actual difference between snowy and foggy climate. Night and day effects are present, as well as the air temperature, humidity, wind speed etc. Anyway, you can correct the driving conditions to your preference, so that's an additional benefit at least. Car models are not too bad though, and you will explore all kinds of car drag racing types. The textures in the game have a pleasing overall and during the racing you're gonna observe some nice features like tire tracks, smoking engines, and car damage visibility. Collisions occur occasionally, which may cause your car to tumble and toss - this appears realistic. It wouldn't have been a bad idea to add a few more features here; like engine explosions and hull bursting, that sort of stuff. The music sometimes creates a dynamic atmosphere; regrettably though, you become sick of the recurring sound of the commentator's voice. Furthermore, some of the engine sounds could have been a lot more genuine.

The crowd doesn't seem to like their seats...

More smoking tires.

The main interface shows the main readouts: speedometer, tachometer, oil pressure, oil, water, and transmission temperature. Next to that you will observe a scale which displays the distance to the start line (it will make the line-up for the start of the race much easier to accomplish). When the race lights turn yellow you may blast off at last! During the race I noticed that the vehicle controls are very hard to manage and I could barely turn sideways (than again this is not very important in drag racing is it?). As you pass the finish line, colorful parachutes will be released from the car's rear and, wahooo! The race is over! Now you can observe the standard race statistics screen, which shows you how much Mph your dragster achieved and the time it took him to complete the track. Later, you can view the replay of the race on your personal VCR (it is possible to record a single racing event and show it to your girlfriend, if you wish). Camera movement in the game deserves praising; it moves about freely and has all sorts of different angles with zooming capability.

To begin with, the disappointment comes from the fact that there's no option for a two-player game. Although you can find the standard selections for Internet and LAN modes, it's still a presents a nuisance not being able to play with a live player on one computer. This mode becomes tedious when all of the players suddenly start adjusting their car parts, so that they can have a better and faster vehicle that the other guy. As you may have guessed, playing the single-payer mode is not exciting for very long. Throughout playing the season for instance, I detected the dreariness of the tracks - what Bethesda could have done here is create more background detail or a simply a greater number of tracks.

For all you drag racing fans out there, you can be sure that this is an extremely authentic dragster driving simulation with all kinds of vehicle customizations and similar features. However, the whole game gets really tiresome after a few hours of gameplay. More features need to be presented on a racing track, mostly in the sense of the atmosphere - which is not vigorous enough and therefore makes the game less enjoyable. I excepted to see more explosions and damage effects, like in real life drag racing. Drag Racing is supposed to be a thrilling event that should make the adrenaline leak out of your ears. In this case you will probably cough up blood; cause after a while drag racing really becomes a 'drag.'