Insane Review

The beautiful vehicles made me feel good even with all that tumbling. They might seem to lack details both in textures and mashes, but after some driving you realize that is all compensated by their in-game behavior. The first car I picked to drive was a small beetle bug with wheels attached to thin axis (as I already said, I spent most of the time looking at the bottom of the car). Every time I jumped this axis bent, and the wheels would skew, and then return to normal position... really nice and realistic behavior. The same could be said for shock absorbers on other cars. Pay attention to the detailed models of drivers in cars. They will follow your commands with natural motion in coherence with your maneuvering.

The damage model will make smaller parts like rear-view mirrors or spare wheels fall off after you received any damage. This is followed by a gap in the damage model, and you won't see the chases bend until you damage the car sufficiently to deform his front part to one side, after which the driving becomes more difficult as the wheels are pulling you to the side.

The terrains look very nice, though their outlooks will mostly depend on your hardware, as Insane tends to slow down drastically when you get a lot of objects on screen. The terrains are mostly barren surfaces; with a lonely stalk here, a lonely bush there. Herds of bisons, some nice water surfaces, muddy grounds or rain often break this visual monotony. You can go for a drive in the mornings, afternoons or nights. The thing that bothered me most was the relatively small size of terrains. Just like in 4x4 Evolution (or pacman) you cannot get off the level, because once you reached one side you'll emerge from the other.

Even though you can initially access only three locations, this number increases as you progress through the game, to some, as I calculated, 999,999,999 levels! No, I didn't eat those funny mushrooms again... There is an option for randomly generating terrains from a nine-digit number. I guess this should infinitely increase replay value, for as much as you try, you'll never be able to drive all the tracks. One thing that could happen to you though, is typing in various combinations of digits hoping you'll get an interesting track...

There... Insane can be an interesting game, and on the other hand... After a couple of days of playing it I do not know how to define it. I did get some kicks out of playing it, especially in multiplayer mode. However, many aspect, like: the visuals and the AI routines still need a lot of work.