With trade show season upon us, it is time for a few new games. The first of the bunch is Smash DX, coming to us from LAI Games and the Chinese amusement factory Superwing. We’ve already covered this in its original form as Extreme Offroad from some hints out there, but let’s dive in further with this localized LAI version thanks to the new information that they have published.
Note that I have reached out to LAI for comment on a couple of unclear things that I bring up below but since it’s Friday evening my time, I probably won’t have an answer for a little bit. I will try to update the post below whenever I have those answers.
Smash DX – Cabinet
Let’s start with the cabinet. Sporting a 55″ HD screen and motion base, the art direction moves away from the typical “car just got out of the car wash” look to one that conveys a quad that’s just come off of the back roads. The marquee also stands out pretty well, with some nice parallaxing from the looks of it.
There are four color schemes (red, green, blue, purple) and operators can link up to four units at once. It should have standard driving controls, although you’ll notice that it does feature some thumb buttons. Let’s get into that with the software.
Smash DX – The game
At its heart, Smash DX is an offroad combat racing game. When I first heard about it I was thinking this might play like Dirty Drivin’, but after watching a gameplay video that is posted to their page (and below), it feels like Dirty Drivin’ mixed with K.O. Drive. Either way, the game features vehicular combat with weapons along with the ability to smash into opponent vehicles and blow them up. I’m not sure how that pausing effect when a smash takes place might work in multiplayer (I assume it won’t pause everyone’s game when it happens).
There are ten vehicles to choose from and five courses to race. There’s also some sort of leveling system, but one question I sent to LAI was: “How does that work?”. It additionally tracks score by your finishing rank, drift time, air time, damage dealt, kills, and “destroy,” although I’m unsure what is different about that from damage and kills.
The voice acting is… slightly strange, with lots of odd pauses and awkward grammar. It seems like it was done by AI, or by that combined with a text-to-speech program that used translated English from Chinese. If LAI wants someone to do some proper VOs, I’m game 😉 Although perhaps you can say its part of the charm.
The game debuted at IAAPI this week, and will be at DEAL in Dubai next week then Amusement Expo later this month. I’m not entirely sure yet when it will start shipping, but that’s another piece of info I’ll update once I know. I assume it will be ready to roll out to US venues by the Summer, as is typical of games that are revealed at Spring shows.
I will get some hands-on time with this at Amusement Expo, but if you are attending DEAL, you’ll get a chance to play it too. What do you think from what has been shown of Smash DX so far?
