The awesomely/ridiculously titled Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars (SARPBC from now on, for the sake of our sanity) is a variation of football (soccer, if you’re one of those America-people) in which the ball is massive, glowing and silver, you’re encased into an in-door arena, and you’re in cars with rockets attached. Hence ‘Rocket-Powered Battle Cars’.

It’s supersonic because these cars have boost that enables them to go, well, supersonic, and they’re acrobatic because they have rockets on the bottom that shoot them upwards – i.e. jumping – and, whilst in the air, they can spin like there’s no tomorrow.

Well, that’s the title explained, let’s get to the game, shall we? It’s a downloadable game (from PSN, obviously) that costs £7.99 – there’s a demo that you have to download, then you download/buy the full game upgrade. £7.99? Know what? It’s definitely worth it.

It’s easy to learn but much more difficult to master (by which I mean really master). The controls are simple enough, R2 accelerates, L2 brakes and reverses, X jumps (press it again and it double jumps), double-tap X quickly whilst holding a direction and your car will flip in that direction as it’s in the air (useful for hitting the ball harder), circle boosts, square handbrakes, triangle shifts the camera to point at the ball and, of course, the left stick steers.

If you go supersonic (by boosting for a second or so) and hit an enemy player they’ll explode in a large explosion, go supersonic and hit the ball squarely and you’ll send it shooting across the pitch, complete with a trail of light and a ‘boom’ sound. You replenish your boost by either driving over yellow pads on the ground which each replenish a small amount of by driving through a boost canister, which then fully replenishes your boost. If you boost while you’re in the air you can ‘fly’, which can lead to the above goals.

Knowing all of this is all well and good, but it’s not enough. You see, knowing it and it these into action whilst you’re in the midst of the hectic matches are two different thing. When you first play the game you’ll probably be taken-aback at how sharply the cars turn, and how well they do. It can take a while to get used to turning, so you can imagine the skill it takes to fly across the pitch and score like in the above link. However, it’ll only take a few offline matches against the computer to get proficient with the controls and physics of the game, leaving you to battle your way through the single player modes.

Speaking of which; there are two single player modes – Tournament mode, which pits you against computer controlled players (and alongside, too) in matches, either 1v1s, 2v2s, 3v3s or 4v4s, with varying difficulties of AI. You get 1-5 stars for winning, the more you win by, the more stars you get. The other mode is a collection of mini-games. Examples are handicapped games (1v2, 1v3),saving a certain amount of shots from cannons, hitting a certain amount of balls into goal as quickly as possible, collecting as many boost canisters as possible in a time limit, etc. There are rows of these and, after finished each row, you unlock an extra car and the next row. You get stars for doing these too (usually either collect more or do it faster).

Collecting stars in either mode gives you trophies; a trophy for each of 25 stars, 50, 75, 100 and all stars. The stars are shared between the two modes, too. There are other trophies, of course, things like completing tournament mode, getting a hat trick or scoring backwards online, etc.

Oh yes, there is online and, as much of a good distraction and training the offline modes are (including split screen multiplayer), the online multiplayer is the real meat of the game. Online, the games can get hectic and challenging and brilliantly fun. As good as single player matches are, it is satisfying to know there’s a real person on the other end controlling the car you just blew up, or behind the other team you just totally owned.

You can join friends online, as long as they’re waiting for a game to start in a server that isn’t full (not too likely for you to just happen on this, though, so you might need to prearrange it). You can start a team with friends and battle against other teams. It’s all got leaderboards to track how many wins, goals, etc and see how high (or low) you are compared to everybody who’s played online or just your friends, if you prefer.

To get into a game, you use either a matchmaking system that searches within the size of game you want (1v1, 2v2, etc)and, if you prefer, on a specific arena (the game comes with 3 but a fourth has been patched in free since) or, after you’ve started matchmaking you can open a server list and just pick one. Online is mostly lag free, but there can be some latency problems every once in a while, resulting in the game being painfully slow and sometimes even resulting in the game being unplayable.

The online community aspect is a little clunky, joining with friends and inviting them to join your team can be awkward, but it is functional and will probably be fixed in an upcoming patch.

Generally the game is very enjoyable and is a sure-fire way to have a hell of a lot of fun. There are a few bugs, like falling through the map for some reason, though rarely, or a menu not loading and just the background being visible, making you restart the game, or the previously mentioned lag issues. These are set to be fixed in an upcoming patch though, along with a few extra features and another free arena to play on.

If you’re interested, just try the demo. Chances are, you’ll enjoy it a hell of a lot and, if you don’t, you don’t lose anything at all. Besides, buying it only sets you back £7.99 and will probably result in fun of the rocket-powered battle car football variety. Come on, you’ve seen that episode of Top Gear, you want to play football in car, don’t you?

7/10

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