New game news has been spotty for a while and this story will not take exception to the larger stream of news we’ve had coming from regions like Japan, Taiwan and China for the past month. At the recent GTI Asia Taipei Expo 2013 event in Taiwan, Taiwanese company IGS made a big deal about a new racing game called Overtake. Just judging by the pictures it looked like an answer to Western driving games like Dead Heat but now we have video of the game in action to clarify.
What I take from the videos is a blending between the more realistic graphics of games like Dead Heat and Speed Driver 4, with unrealistic action movie style elements in the environments like you find with The Fast and The Furious driving series. At the moment it appears that they are marketing this for the Chinese and Taiwanese markets but often IGS likes to offer up an English version too for anyone that wants to import one. They don’t seem to make a big marketing push on those games elsewhere however so I think they get overlooked. Of course pushing a driving game onto the Western market is easier said than done when there is a lot of existing competition to deal with by various big name companies with their own racing games that they are pushing.
Here’s the Overtake game being played on the cabinet. I like the screen and the control panel. The LED lighting in the panel makes it look much more interesting than you typically see although in some ways I am reminded of H2Overdrive’s backlit tachometers. Graphically it looks excellent, well-above FnF Super Cars and Dead Heat, although the way it plays reminds me much more of Super Cars. One extra feature found here unique to the game however is the Slow Motion event that occurs 3:26 in. It kind of looks like a QTE although you just pick a path and watch what happens in slo-mo.
Here’s a CG movie kind of trailer to get the player pumped up to find an Overtake cabinet at a game center near them
And finally for some direct footage from the game, here you go:
This game is NOT just limited to Asian territories, it is scheduled for a full worldwide release in 2014.
I Recently found it in Israel at the Pgame arcade you mentioned in the post about the Arcades of this country you wrote Over a year ago, Instead of Outrun 2. I’m the one who contacted you through Youtube and made you write the post about Israel.