Retro Spotlight: Split/Second

An arcade racer made to look and feel more like a racing sim. At least, when things around you aren't literally exploding.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

If you just looked at the front cover of Black Rock Studios’ Split/Second, you’d have no idea that it was anything besides a typical racing game. It’s just a black car racing against the backdrop of a city positioned above the game’s logo, with a white mirror image below said logo: nothing special or particularly noteworthy. The promotional art tells a far different story, maybe in an attempt to avoid committing the same sin as the box art: you see explosions, wrecked cars, buildings falling apart and crashing into the road — that’s more of what Split/Second is about than just racing a sleek-looking vehicle. And it rules.

Split/Second is an arcade racing game, set within a television show that promises a spectacle. The more standard races in each “episode” of this show still have you and your opponents setting off explosives that alter the track and crush other cars underneath the wreckage, or signaling a helicopter hovering above the track to drop an explosive on the road, and possibly even on top of a rival vehicle. When selecting a car, you can’t just be concerned with how fast it goes or how well it drifts: you also need to consider how strong the car itself is, how capable of withstanding the shockwave from a nearby explosion it is. And again, this is just how the most standard races in Split/Second go.

You can’t just set off these bombs and traps and the like whenever you want. No, you must first fill up a meter in order to utilize these “power plays,” and you do that by successfully drifting, drafting off of other cars, grabbing some air off of a jump, and by surviving close calls with explosions or falling buildings or what have you. In order to successfully race the Split/Second-specific way, you must also thrive at the more standard racing elements. Thankfully, these all feel great: there is more of a racing sim feel to much of the Split/Second gameplay than there is an arcade feel, that is, until you decide to ramp up said arcade elements in order to focus on explosions and car wrecks and finding shortcuts to help you secure a first-place finish.

Now that’s more like it. Image credit: Gameralpha

The power plays are also not all-powerful, screen-clearing attacks by any means. They can be, if you happen to time things right and, say, rack up a triple wreck with the press of a single button that catapults you ahead in the standings, but if you aren’t careful and strategic, you’re just going to waste your chances to literally and figuratively blow the competition away. Or you might wreck yourself by putting your own car too close to an explosion, or a giant construction vehicle that’s going to sweep the road clear of anything in its path, or even accidentally dropping a huge ship in dry dock right in your way because you didn’t time that particular trap with your own survival in mind.

There is a lot more to Split/Second’s strategy than just driving fast and then mashing A whenever the opportunity to use a power play comes up, is what I’m getting at. You really do need to be strategic, especially since certain traps are used up once per race and that’s that: you can get helicopters to drop a payload on rival cars every time you pass them (so long as you have the meter to spare), but that’s a pretty limited attack — you can only drop a specific building or section of highway onto the road once, because once it falls, well, there it is.

Your opponents, too, are also capable of opening up shortcuts or attempting to blow you or their other rivals up, as well. So you also can’t just sit on all of the best attacks until the last lap, because it is entirely possible that the AI has decided they have a good chance of dropping a piece of elevated highway on top of you and then using that as a ramp toward a shortcut while you get sent back a few spots in the standings. It’s all a balance, and you’ll eventually get a feel for the right time for everything.

And again: these are just your standard races. The television show you are playing has a whole lot more events than just these! Consider Air Strike, which sees an attack chopper following you around a race track, firing off ever-growing barrages of missiles at you. Your goal is to avoid being directly hit by these missile attacks while traveling at high speed, and to also swerve out of the way of the explosions themselves, lest the shockwave from them blow you off course into a wall or dismantle your car with their sheer force themselves. And then there’s Elimination, which is basically musical chairs, but with race cars: when the timer runs out, if you’re in last place, you’re eliminated. It starts out at 60 seconds, and then every elimination thereafter takes more like 10 seconds, so get to first and stay there. There is an event where enormous big rigs drop explosive barrels in your way, with the blue ones damaging your car and slowing it down, putting you in danger of follow-up attacks, while the red ones automatically wreck your vehicle. Passing the big rigs increases your score, but there’s always another one, and getting close to them is dangerous, too, since you have less time to react.

All of these events add real flavor and challenge and Split/Second, since they require different things from you each time. And they, more than the standard races, are going to be where you find yourself switching up your vehicles. You won’t catch me driving one of the slower — and I mean slow for a race car, not slow slow — vehicles, like the trucks, in the standard races, but when an attack helicopter is sending missile barrages after me while I try to survive long enough to set a high score? Give me that truck, it’s got more resistance to damage than its faster car cousins, and the slower speed means I’m less likely to speed myself into an unavoidable explosion, too.

There are 12 episodes in the “Championship Season,” which is the standard game mode of Split/Second. Each has the regular races I’ve described, as well as a couple of events like Air Strike or Elimination, and while your placement in these events does matter, you don’t need to finish in first place to advance to the next episode. No, your accrued points for finishing in first or second or what have you unlock new vehicles and events, as does the number of wrecks of your rivals that you’re responsible for. Wreck enough cars during an episode, and you’ll unlock the elite race against the named AI opponents.

You do have a ranking within the season, so your placement does matter in the long run with the goal being to finish first overall in the season championship: you can go back and replay events with your shiny newer vehicles that withstand damage, drive faster, and drift more effectively in order to secure first place in all of those later on, rather than doing it right then when you first encounter them.

In addition to the championship season with the episodes, there is also a quick play mode that lets you mess around with any event that you’ve unlocked in the main game, and split-screen multiplayer, as well. Sadly, the servers for the game are no longer up, so you can’t play online anymore. There are workarounds if you’re playing on a PC that you can find pretty easily, but even without online multiplayer or even in-person multi, Split/Second is a ton of fun and worth it 12 years later.

Now, you can still play Split/Second pretty easily. Since it initially released on the Xbox 360 and is backwards compatible, it’s available digitally on the Xbox Marketplace for $20, which means you can grab it for the 360 if you still have that, or Xbox One, or Series X/S. The Playstation 4 doesn’t have the same kind of BC functionality as the Xbox family of systems, so, sadly, while you can still download it on your PS3 for $20 until Sony shuts that storefront down, it’s not available on either of its successor consoles. (There is, however, a Playstation Portable version, though I can’t speak to how well it holds up.) A physical copy of the game is going to be even cheaper than the digital one, too, so you don’t necessarily need to go digital in order to grab it. Split/Second is also available on Windows, through Steam or one of the 900 PC game storefronts, so you certainly do not lack for options here. I’m lucky enough to have the 360 version playing on a Series X, so it’s upscaled and both looks and runs great, and without any loading times.

Sadly, Split/Second’s developer, Black Rock Studios, is no more. The game was published by Disney Interactive Studios, which entered the console gaming space and then exited it nearly as quickly, leaving destruction in their wake. Rather than sell off Black Rock Studios, Disney shuttered them when the company’s new management made the decision to focus more on social games than console ones. Black Rock Studios’ former employees went on to found a number of new studios, so they weren’t all set adrift forever, but man, if Disney’s intent was to cut overhead, you think they’d attempt to get something back for the well-regarded studio fresh off of a well-regarded game instead of just closing it, especially since, as Eurogamer reported at the time, the closures had nothing to do with Black Rock’s performance or the sales of their games.

Before the outright closure, Disney laid off a significant number of Black Rock employees, which ended development on a sequel to Split/Second as well as one to their previous game, the quad-bike trick-racer Pure. I already have no shortage of reasons to be mad at Disney and how they adversely impact movies, television, and so on: please stay out of video games forever if this is how you’re going to be about them, leave me to my refuge.

Anyway. Split/Second is great, and is still widely available despite releasing 12 years ago, thanks to how well PC and now Xbox-family games are preserved. Disney might not have seen the value in games like this, but if you play for even a few minutes, you certainly will.

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