World Racing | DJcube

Fasten your seatbelt and step into the shoes of a works driver for Mercedes-Benz

EU release: 8th April 2004
NA release: N/A
JP release: N/A
Developer: Synetic
Publisher: TDK Mediactive
NGC Magazine: 19%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

Another racing with an unbelievably dull name and, once again, it’s a great reflection of the game itself. It’s a racing game that only has Mercedes-Benz cars and makes them all seem like they’re terrible to drive – being really stiff and slow, with terrible turning. Even the menus are convoluted and confusing, although there are a vast amount of tracks. Sort of.

There are a bunch of different locations which are large “open” maps. They can look nice from a distance but everything looks awful up close. The tracks are poorly designed and anything that looks like a shortcut usually leads to the wrong part of the track or a dead end, which results in making the slow races even duller. You can drive around freely, but all you’ll find is broken scenery, holes. Some stuff you can bash, others will stop you in your tracks, but most stuff you’ll just drive straight through. It’s quite easy to break out of the maps, too.

I did burst out laughing in the first level. It seems the developers were aware of how boring the game was and just added a lot of stuff flying in the sky. The first level – an army air base – goes overboard with this with helicopters, planes, stealth jets and UFOs flying about like mad. It looks like a cheesy arcade racer, but definitely doesn’t play like one. Mercedes-Benz did later manage to shove their advertising into better racing games, such as Mario Kart 8, making that game marginally worse.

Poor

To be fair, we have seen some amazing things in the game, not least the time an opponent in a 4×4 repeatedly attempted to mount a convertible that was stuck on an awkward polygon in an Alpine tunnel. We even drove out into the Japanese nuclear wastelands and can confirm the stories are true – the entire world really does vanish and turn to black if you drive too fast round there.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #94

Remake or remaster?

Not for this.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get World Racing.