The new platform section
Ok, so I think we’ve firmly established that Nadeo and DJ have spent an awful lot of time on making sure that the tracks test your driving skills given the limitations of the type of car you’re driving. The track design is such that you’ll soon find that sheer speed is not enough, and often what appears to be with quickest route may well not be. After a few races, you’ll soon see that backing off has its advantages too.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the new platform sections where it’s not about how quick you complete a race but how many resets it takes you to do it. You see, if you fall of the track at anytime, playing any part of the game, you just hit the reset button and you settle back on the road at the last checkpoint you passed, all you’ve lost is a bit of time. On the trickier race sections this can be a boon as it sometimes leaves you perfectly lined up for the next jumped you just missed… but in the platform section, this is a bad thing as the idea is to cross the line having finished the track in as few attempts as possible.
Time is not a factor in these sections, so its well worth having a look-see first as quite often flooring it and hoping for the best will only see you flying off into space. That said, there’s plenty of times when you need to have speed AND control to see you across the jumps or round a loop. And just to further complicate things, the platform sections have been cunningly designed to take advantage of not just your car’s strengths, but it’s weaknesses too. So you’ll often find yourself cursing like a trooper as you try and manhandle the lumbering 4x4 at high speed through a series of chicanes just to have the speed to clear a jump over a stretch of water to make it to the next checkpoint…
The thing is, as hair-pullingly frustrating as the platform section is, you always seem to get just a little further, or manage to get round in one less reset, so the desire to have another go and try and do better is a strong pull back for more.