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Gas Guzzlers Extreme

Tried playing this as one of the highest rated racing games on Steam 
that was on sale ($7), The other one that's higher is Rocket League 
which seems to be some sort of soccer with cars, but it's considerably 
more expensive and has a million DLCs which was worrisome, and I'm not 
into soccer.  I grabbed this after The Crew left me frustrated with lag 
and difficulty.

It's a map racer with guns & powerups.  Online multiplayer is available, 
I only found a 2 to 5 other people playing online though, so not an 
awful lot of competition.    I found it pretty good, it was smooth as 
butter compared to The Crew both in controls & lag, and I found the 
voices you can choose for your driver pretty funny.  I chose Arnold who 
sounds like a certain actor with the same first name.   I haven't tried 
the other ones yes as I think you have to start over to do that.

Visually it looks pretty good, the car models are a bit less refined 
than The Crew and the game is obviously lower budget, but other than 
that I didn't really see much to detract from it, but I'm not all about 
the graphics, so I don't know for sure.

Easy mode is really easy, and Medium seems about my speed.  I tend to 
get middle of the pack finishing about 4th with the odd win and loose on 
Medium.  The campaign is pretty hard in the sense that if you finish 3rd 
or above it increases the level of your opponents cars, while you have 
to have the money to buy and upgrade to that level yourself, I once got 
stuck about 5 car levels behind for quite some time as I finished about 
5 in a row in 3rd place and quickly dropped to the back of the pack and 
wasn't earning enough to buy a new car.

You get money by 2 things, by your position in the race some races 
double rewards from 3rd to 1st, while others only reward 1st.  You also 
get money from collateral damage and destroying other's cars, I've oft 
got more money from taking out other cars than the winner got from 
winning.

There's 5 different types of races:

1. Fist race in which you've got no guns, but the powerups are still 
available - which are things like smoke, oil, nitro, repair, mines, etc. 
  Most of those are pretty useless except nitro which is crucial.  Oil 
is actually worse than useless as it remains and you'll run into your 
own oil on additional circuits of the track.  You can also get nitro by 
hitting other cars or destructible objects, however most destructible 
objects will slow you down more than the nitro will speed you up.

2. Guns race.  This is mostly what I play as I can usually knock out 3 
or 4 cars which nets a lot of cash.  The guns are fairly limited, for a 
gun based car game there's not an awful lot of choice, 1 shotgun, 2 
automatic guns, 2 rockets and a flack gun, as well as a version of the 
shotguns & autmatics that shoot both forward and backward.  I'm only 
about a 3rd of the way through the campaign so there may be more I 
haven't unlocked, but I'll say that the weapons upgrades lag behind the 
car armor, so that it's far easier to blow up another car with a shotgun 
in the first few levels, than it is to blow up a level of car I'm at 
with rockets.  The flack gun seems about useless too, as the flack 
explodes a certain distance in-front of you and doesn't do anything 
before or after, and it seems to do less damage than rockets, even 
though it's the highest weapon I've got.  In races with guns you also 
can get full nitro for blowing up another car, and as I mentioned nitro 
is crucial.  You just won't be able to keep up with most cars without 
it.  Most of the powerups still mostly useless here, but mines can 
accutally add a little damage which will help you knock out another car, 
and smoke can get someone off your tail for a bit, and repairs are 
useful since you'll be taking damage from weapons.

3. Knock-Out, this race only rewards 1st position, but it's 2x as much 
as the guns race.  Each lap the last car is knocked out and you have 
guns so cars can be knocked out too.  I don't like this one as it's very 
hard to get 1st with the way the game works, so avoid it.

4. King.  Also only awards 1st place.  There's not really a track here, 
instead it's a field with obstacles and power ups, ans the goal is to 
knock out the most number of other cars.  This one opens up a bit later. 
I find this much harder than the guns race as the ai focuses completely 
on destroying other cars instead of splitting between racing and

5 Tournament.  These are a bit more rare, but if you do well enough you 
open up a tournament in which you get a free car (huge at later stages 
of the game) of the next level if you win, you don't get upgrades though 
so you want to do it when you've got a lot of cash sitting around to get 
all of them.  You basically have to play one each of the other races and 
do best out of all of them vs. all the other AI players.  I've only done 
it once, but it didn't seem that hard, as if one of the AIs is beating 
you in the other races you can focus on taking them out early in one 
which drops them to last place in that race hugely affecting their rank.

Maps - The maps are pretty varied, there's one set in the middle east, 
on in france with castles, one in snow, a standard racing track etc.  In 
campaign the maps only change when you finish a race in the top 3, when 
I was stuck for awhile, that means I was on the same snow track over and 
over which was pretty frustrating. On the other hand I got to know it 
really well

Online - there's a number of official servers, reminds me of how 
counter-strike was set up back in the day.  Not much activity, of the 
couple times I tried there was 2 people on one, then the next time 5 on 
one, only 1 hand any people.  If I don't have to play with online people 
I won't, so I only tried it out a couple times, and am not really sure 
how it works.  I finished about middle of the pack both times though.

Overall a pretty fun little game, well worth the price, but gets a bit 
repetitive at the point at I'm.  It's got a lot of bad humor in it like 
the aforementioned Arnold driver voice and sponsors like "Mighty Cock" 
which I think is some sort of chicken restaurant.

- Justisaur