Chariot Racing sounds like an interesting premise for a game, especially when you consider the potential it holds. Think Road Rash but with chariots. Anyone who has seen the movie Ben-Hur can imagine just how brutal and exciting chariot racing can get. These horse drawn wood and metal vehicles can have spikes fitted to their wheels to damage opponents and destroy their chariots. It was the Demolition Derby of the ancients, though it also claimed lives due to its brutal nature.
Did that get you excited about a chariot racing game? Did you think Chariot Wars fulfils this craving for chariot racing that you’ve now developed? Sadly, your dreams will be shattered, since all this potential has gone to waste in the execution of this game called Chariot Wars. To put it bluntly, this game is bad.
Chariot Wars has quite the boastful description in the Steam store and a price tag to match. Some of the claims are outright lies since we saw nothing of the sort in the game itself. This game isn’t even early access for us to think that these features might be added later.
In Chariot Wars, you can play both single player and multiplayer, though the latter requires the creation of another account. In single player, one can start a championship, which has races against AI opponents, or use Practice mode to complete laps around the in-game tracks and learn them. The game has only four tracks and each track has a day and a night variant. While three of the tracks let you race two laps, the fourth is annoyingly long and is limited to a single lap. The locations of the tracks are Helvetia, Gaul, Greece and Egypt.
One can start a championship in Chariot Wars and each race is preceded by a short comic telling the story of the game. While the comic is beautifully drawn, there isn’t an easy way to skip it and it hampers replayability. We found that the Continue Championship button was broken. Instead, we had to manually select the last unlocked race and start the championship from here to continue. The story has no real connection with the actual game since it talks of a plot on the Roman emperor and our hero must win chariot races in order to solve the case. While it mentions that the races are being held in the Eternal City, Rome, there isn’t a single race set there, nor is there any racing in an arena, as you would expect from the longwinded intro movie.
In terms of Gameplay, Chariot Wars is a terrible experience. The Chariot animations are repetitive and broken with the female models seeming to warp through their clothes. Turing on the realistic cloth physics option is a big mistake since the crazy jerking of the cloth appears far from reality. The track has invisible walls at the sides that are located inside of the visual barriers and this can lead to unexpected crashes. However, besides slowing you down, crashing does little else. Some tracks have irregular terrain, which also seems to collide with the bottom of your chariot and makes for a sparks-filled race, despite the chariot visibly being clear of the ground. Crashing into the AI opponents is another story. The AI seems to follow a predetermined path right through the middle of the track. They will not try to deliberately make you crash out while trying to overtake them, but if you do get entangled, expect to come off worse. This makes the AI look really dumb since they seem to follow the same speed.
Chariot wars offers you eight different unlockable chariots with eight different horse types as well as eight charioteers to choose from. While each of these is supposed to have unique stats, in practice they are all identical. You always get off to a slow start and going through one of the floating coins in the track grants you a ‘speed boost’ that merely looks like a fancy motion blur effect. There is no minimap to indicate the layout of the track and your relative position to the other charioteers. The leaderboard that shows the current standings in the race is woefully broken and takes a while to update your actual position. At one time, it even judged that we had lost a race despite being firmly in the lead. The only sure-fire way to secure victory (which is quite easy given the dumb AI) is to ensure that one has a significant lead in the race.
Chariot Wars is powered by Unity, but the graphics in this game are appalling. The textures are low resolution. The tracks are badly detailed and the models are just plain broken. Even games from 1999 looked better than this monstrosity. The OST seems to reuse a few classical tracks to give the ambience of the era and are quite decent to listen to. The sound effects are nothing special, but seem to serve their purpose. The UI is poorly designed and disregards the aspect ratio of the screen, which means that some elements get cut if you are playing on a 4:3 resolution, as the game seems to be designed for 16:9 screens. There is a single circular shield-like meter showing the amount of speed boost that you have gathered, but it is not even divided into equal parts. The camera is locked to a third person view behind your chariot and has a decent field of vision. However, there is no real way of knowing the location of the AI opponents, nor does the game show any collision warnings.
The game is rather short and the single player mode can be easily beaten in under two hours. The game has multiplayer, but given its poor gameplay, there isn’t much action to be found. The asking price for this game is greatly disproportionate to what it offers. It isn’t even worth a tenth of that price and is more suited to inducing rage than in providing an entertaining experience. It’s just a bad game and if it were cheaper, people might consider buying it to troll their friends, for it has no other use as an entertainment product.
