When I first heard of Gaia Industries upcoming XBLA title Street Trace NYC last year, I have to admit I was somewhat excited. I have a personal affinity towards multiplayer titles and Street Trace NYC looked like it was going to deliver this in spades. The game is based in a post apocalyptic future where people called Tracers ride hover boards in tournaments around a desolate NYC, attempting to earn cash and prizes.

While the story sounded ridiculous, this could easily have been forgiven had the game offered a kick ass multiplayer experience. Unfortunately there are some problems with this title that relegate it to the land of mediocrity.

Gameplay:

The gameplay offered in Street Tracers isn't bad per say initially it's actually a lot of fun. The problem as I see it is that in the long haul the gameplay will get stale. There are 2 different types of game types to choose form, one that is a tournament the other that is a time trial. Tournaments consist of a mix of match types including, "Takedown" which is basically a straight up Death Match. "Flag" which is a mode in which you try to bring back as many flags as possible back to a certain spot. There is a variant of "capture the bunny" in which you gain extra points if you are holding the only flag on the map, and there are also straight up races, some which disarm your weapons.

The weaponry of the game comes in four flavours you have your guided rockets, mines, Stampede (a sort of spread weapon), and pulse gun. Each weapon can be upgraded using cash earned in matches. Which brings me to one of the more interesting dynamics of the game. In tournament mode players can upgrade their weapons and hoverboard in between matches. I'm a sucker for upgrading parts, so this particular feature I thought was kind of neat. Hoverboard upgrades consist of Shields, boosters, jump height and engine speed. Deciding what to upgrade is fun.

The actual game venues (maps) consist of race courses, and Death Match style Arenas. There are tons of "rails" to grind on, and lots of ramps for interesting jumps to boost off. All of the maps also have powerups scattered throughout them ranging from cold hard cash boosters, to weapon or booster juice, to parts upgrades both permanent and temporary.

The hoverboards themselves do have a nice sense of speed and I really enjoyed the grinding dynamic. Learning to control one's board is imperative to survival in the death matches, and the controls while easy to learn are difficult to master. Cutting Power to the hoverboard allows the player to turn their Tracer extremely sharply, while the use of a booster may make the difference between making a jump or smashing into crate. My main problem with the gameplay was that I found it extremely difficult to aim. I bought guided rockets mainly because of this difficulty, although it appears that all the weapons have some degree of auto aim coded in. The control scheme as a whole I thought wasn't bad, but it did seem a bit floaty; there were times I felt my board was totally responding to me and other times that were "WTH why?!" moments.

Graphics:

As I say in all my reviews I'm not a "Tech" guy so you won't hear me spouting things I don't understand. All I can say is that the graphics of this title reminded me a bit of Unreal Tournament 99. I loved Unreal Tournament 99 so this isn't a bad thing per say; but to me the game looked kinda dated.

That said there are a lot of things often happening on the screen in terms of weapon fire, and players zipping around. The graphics aren't bad, but they aren't great either.

Sound:

Again the sound is just ok. Explosions sounded muted to me, and I got really sick of the noise the hover board makes every time you use the turbo boost (which is a lot). To be honest the sound effects overall sounded pretty low budget which I guess maybe is excusable as this is a budget XBLA title. The small amount of voice overs just added to the D list feeling of the game.

Longevity:

Street Trace: NYC is definitely a pick up and play title. Speaking personally I could see me feeling like a couple rounds of Street Trace NYC every once in awhile, I can't see there being enough people playing over Live for this community to survive in the long term. The most fun I had in the game as in multiplayer and even now, one week after release we were having trouble getting a full room going for the tournament mode. Most of the players I talked to over several nights were playing the game to grab up the easier achievements.

Don't get me wrong the game is fun in short bursts but a title like this that relies on multiplayer needs a self sustaining community and I don't see that happening. I'd LIKE for it to happen but somehow I doubt it will. There are just to many triple A titles both on XBLA and full retail coming down the road for players to have any time for mediocrity. The other problem is that there really seemed to be a lack of maps to choose from. While some of the maps have interesting layouts, there aren't enough of them to keep things interesting. At 800 points I feel there should have been more maps included with the game.

Overall:

I really wanted to love this game. I'm a multiplayer whore at heart, and this game caters to that. Unfortunately for Street Trace there are just far too many better games coming down the road for it to be able to maintain the multiplayer community it will need to succeed.

I can see the parts of Street Trace where somebody at Gaia poured their heart; there are glimpses of greatness in the title like when you do a break turn and rocket some poor sap in his or her face or when you boost jump over a ramp to land on a rail grinding your way to an escape from enemies hot on your trail. It is possible that these glimpses of greatness may maintain a small community around the title for a while and to be honest I hope this is what happens; but for those of you looking for an XBLA multiplayer title I recommend holding off at least for a couple weeks on this one, at least until it becomes clearer if the multiplayer community in Street Trace will stick around.