Novadrome brings car fighting games to XBLA and turns out to be very disappointing game.
There are 3 main game modes. Beacon Blast, Free for all, and Human race. There are other modes but they aren't used nearly as much. In all of the levels there are robot mercs that hold weapons that you can acquire if you ram into them. Beacon Blast is where the game is really quite luck based. It is a game of getting through a checkpoint first and once you do another is generated randomly. If you kill someone that has a lot of points (by killing someone that has a lot of checkpoints or by getting checkpoints) you get 75% of their points and they are left with 25% of their original points. So, that means if you kill the person in first, that's almost guaranteed to get you in first place. Human race and the free for all mode are pretty uneventful. In free for all, you can kill people either by ramming into them or by using your weapon. Human race is basically your standard race with the game mechanics and you can actually win every race easily if you make it a priority to kill a robot merc because then you can kill your opponents but they can only ram you.
The main letdown of this game is the primary weapon you use. The weapon is changeable and varies between what car you have. However, it is as simple as being in range and holding the A button to use it. The only possible challenge is staying in range until your target dies. It is simply painful to have the primary gameplay element so badly laid out. However, gameplay other than the weapons is actually pretty good. Ramming takes some skill and it can actually make it seem like you're going fast when you are in the game. Some games of today can't even do that. If they just got rid of the autolock on and made it so the right stick aimed, it would of made this game into one of the best on the arcade but the autolock feature simply ruins this game from being great.
As far as graphics and sound go, it looks and sounds great compared to other arcade games and really appears to be a great game.The multiple different cars have unique and good designs and the environments look pretty nice. The levels however are pretty bland and they recycle a lot of the levels during the career game. It can also be played for a long period of time (if you actually like because of xbox live and a quite long career mode that also has 4 difficulty settings.
Overall, it is a lackluster game that could of been so much more if they would of just tweaked the main part of the game play.