Spawned upstream with Dotstream and Streamline, BitStream is a steer-your-line-around-obstacles racing game with superior audiovisuals and a twist.
Well, it’s a twist compared to Streamline, which Bob compared directly to Dotstream, anyway. I’ve never played Dotstream, myself. It seems a minor twist, but it affects the game in a major way. Here it is: going straight speeds you up.
So, not only are you trying to steer around obstacles and into the omnipresent cliché zoomy chevrons, but you’re trying to do it by steering as little as possible. As a game mechanic it actually works quite well and adds depth to the proceedings.
The game itself doesn’t fare quite as well. The steering feels like it should be finer. It’s not bad over-all, but occasionally feels a bit herky-jerky. The biggest down-side, though, is that the game doesn’t like it if you overlap the lines. If you’ve fallen behind and you’re traveling along straight along a cluster of lines left before you, the game will roughly shove you to one side or the other of the cluster. Now, if you’re in a wide-open space, this does approximately nothing but keep things looking pretty and orderly. Wide-open spaces are the exception, however, and you’ll often find yourself shunted directly into a wall or obstacle. This has the (hopefully) unintended effect of ensuring that if you’ve fallen behind you ain’t gonna’ catch up.
Otherwise, it’s a nice game, with catchy sounds and visual effects and a lineup of multi-player modes – and a weird synth-beat-looper mode. Just be aware of the unforgiving difficulty when you go in.
Other posts you might find interesting:
- Plasma Spheres Plasma Spheres is a platform puzzler whereby you take control...
- Streamline “The racer redefined”. Indeed. Redefined by Dotstream a couple of...
- Wacky Karts It seems inevitable that any “Mode 7″-styled go-kart racer gets...
Reading the game text, I think the shoving was meant to be part of a “drafting” mechanic to HELP players in the rear catch up. …gone horribly wrong.
The game looks and sounds great but I’m not very good at it. Actually really bad is probably more accurate.
I really like a lot of things about this game, namely:
-presentation
-graphics
-music
-controls
-game mechanics
I think the one area that could have used a bit of tweaking was the level design, which impacts the difficulty of this game to a large degree.
A favourite series of mine is the futuristic Wip3out series found on the PlayStation consoles. It has a high learning curve when it comes to managing the physics of the machine, but this is made easy to manage by starting out with easy to play tracks. Later on, the tracks get very insane and take a high degree of skill to finish. This is also the case with the F-Zero games (even the SNES ones!).
This game could have really used some easy to play levels in the beginning, and the current tracks you face early in the game should have been found near the end, IMO.