4x4 Evo 2 - A nostalgia-fueled jank-engine

Hey hey Wombatants, Michael here.

And we've gone and played another old game from my childhood! And i just wanna lay this down for ya: This one's -properly- nostalgic for me. Child Michael sank many hours into this game, and it was a formative experience.

4x4 Evo 2 is a 2001 racing game developed by Terminal Reality, who also made the Bloodrayne games, Kinect Star Wars and..... The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. Right. That's rather an interesting resumé.

The game is, as the name implies, focused on off-road vehicles, with the tracks being mostly loose-surface trails or even straight-up wilderness.

It had multiplayer of course, though that's obviously not something we'll be looking at, today. We opened the menu for it once though, and it looked like we just started a custom OS or something.😛

For solo, it of course had quick races and time attack stuff, but notably, this game had a career mode, where you earn money either through racing or doing missions. You can then buy or upgrade cars. Upgrades include all kinds of internal stuff for engine, drivetrain etc., but also some more visible upgrades like suspension lift kits, bigger tires, snorkels and the like.

This is also the mode i played like mad as a kid, and the one we'll mainly be looking at, today.

But let's get the technical stuff out of the way first and talk about...

-Graphics-

Well look, it's an old game. Quite pleasantly, we found that it works just fine at modern resolutions, though we had to set our renderer to "Direct3D 8.1 Hardware TNL" to pull that off, otherwise the camera did funky things above 800x600.

Also, the game complained about us having 0 "Swap disc" space available, and letting us know that it runs best with 100Mb of it. We can only assume it meant ram or vram. Whatever triggers that warning probably doesn't recognize the modern tech it's running on. But the game itself ran just fine.

And well, the game looks.... okay, for it's time. It was never really a visual feast, but it did have a consistent look. And that look is defined by a rather muted colour palette:

Assuming this was a stylistic choice, i'd say it's probably to reflect the fact that you're not on glitzy, glamour-y racetracks but out in nature, gettin' your wheels dirty. Buuut it might not have been that intentional. Who knows.

Anyhow, why don't i tell you about....

-Sound-

The sound in this game is...... well, it's kinda weak, if we're being honest. There's exactly one engine sound that all the cars use, there's occasional audio glitches when you bump into something, and the rare bit of dialogue in the missions is so quiet you can barely make out what's being said.

But at least it's got some more of that funky early 2000's video game music we enjoyed in Aquanox! Not quite as prolific here, but it's still kinda neat.

And well, let me be frank: The music of this game is absolutely burned into my mind. As in, it drilled itself into my head when i was little, and now i'm forever stuck with it. And so is Amalia!😜

So, why don't we tuck into it and talk about the meaty bits of the game, starting with:

-The career mode-

And ehrm, right away, there's a bit of a problem. You see, the way the career mode is supposed to work is that you've got a variety of racing series that you can take part in. Basically tournaments, where you get some money and points after each race depending on your position, and then at the end, the driver with the most points wins the series and takes home the main prize.

Now, some of these series are vehicle-specific. Some are for certain car brands, say Jeep or Lexus. Others might be specifically for full-size SUVs, or for RWD vehicles only. That kind of thing. For some series, there's special qualifier events you must take part in to unlock them. But you see, there's a problem with all of this.

Because right from the start of the game, you can enter in the World Championship series.

It's 17 races, which is fairly long-ish (takes about a couple of hours in total), but you can see that the big price is half a million bucks.

Now you might be thinking: But surely, you don't stand a chance if you just enter that with your puny starter vehicle? And you'd be right.

...... if the game was balanced like that. But it isn't. It actually does the Elder Scrolls thing and makes sure that the AI is in similar-performing vehicles to yours, no matter the series.

Sooooo right from the start of the game, you can enter the world championship and have a fair chance of winning half a million every couple hours of play.

Now we're not really the type to hyper-optimize our playstyle in games or anything, but frankly, the fact that you can do this makes like 90% of the other series in the game utterly pointless. The only reason we ever even played any other series at all is because we wanted to see some tracks that aren't featured in the world championship series.

But money isn't -quite- everything, here. There's also the "Team" mechanic.

Basically, the really nice vehicles and parts are only available for purchase if you're a member of the appropriate team. The teams will take notice of you as you win races, and eventually invitations will open for qualifying events to join them.

Mind you, each team is focused on a particular brand.

So, over the course of our playthrough here, our goal was to try out some of the best, most fancy and expensive vehicles in the game, and when we've found our favourite, do the missions in that vehicle (the missions being one of the main things i loved about this game as a kid).

This meant running the world championship a few times. Half a million is a huge amount in this game, but the most fancy vehicles are more expensive still, some costing up to 850,000 bucks, and that's before upgrades.

It also meant switching teams a few times so we could get access to those vehicles. That was usually the biggest pain, because you have to do those team qualifiers in a car of the brand the team is associated with. This means that if we wanted this thing:

..... we'd have to join Sakurai, the Toyota team. But we couldn't run their qualifier in our decked-out GMC racing truck, so we had to buy a Toyota and spend our hard-earned money on making that thing somewhat driveable with upgrades in order to beat the qualifier.

Also, doing this turned out to be a mistake. This Toyota race truck, as well as the Chevrolet one are weirdly coded and barely get off the line, even with lots of upgrades. Would not recommend those in this game.

As for our playthrough, we started out with this GMC Sierra:

Then, we drove this GMC Sierra race truck for a good while:

Then we had a brief stint in the one and only Monster Truck in the game, which is based on a GMC Sierra:

But then, just to prove that we're not sponsored by GMC, we got one of the three most expensive vehicles in the game, and curiously, the only one of the three that's actually 4x4:

The big bad Dodge Ram racing truck. Shown here with it's fully upgraded stats. This thing is decked out!

But enough about the destination. What about the journey? Why don't we see what Amalia has to say about the....

-Racing-

Hi folks! So, well, the racing in this game is..... playable, but quite janky. Mostly the vehicles all feel just about the same. The main differences come about through upgrades. Particularly the suspension height and tire size.

Those rather heavily affect how your vehicle handles. Other than that, there's all sorts of performance upgrades that simply make the power numbers go up and make car go vroom faster.

The Monster Truck stands out a bit in that regard because.... well it's odd, the wheels do have the full hitbox and can collide with stuff, but the traction isn't actually there, so this thing -feels- like it should have massive amounts of grip because of the giant tires, but it handles almost like you had normal, standard truck tires on there. In short, it feels wrong, which is why we didn't end up using the thing much.

Mind you, the game does also have vehicle setup options:

You get to change them each time you go racing, and they get stored automatically, so you can set them how you like and leave it there. Would really recommend playing around with these though, because they do actually have a pretty big impact on how the vehicles behave. Also yes, we played with automatic transmission. Kinda weird in an offroad game, but it's how Michael used to play it, and we wanted to keep the nostalgia trip somewhat authentic.😛

So, when you're doing races in this game, there's two things you'll notice fairly quickly:

For one, the physics. On the one hand, the suspension physics are actually pretty good, when in contact with normal terrain.

However, anything that has a 3D-model and a hitbox is..... different.

Some objects can be pushed around and interacted with, and these are mostly fine, meant to be obstacles that you want to avoid because they can slow you down. What's more "different" is the static 3D objects, like large boulders, stone pillars and the like.

Sometimes, a boulder that's half sunk in the ground can be driven over just fine, if your suspension clearance is big enough.

Other times, it'll just act like a solid wall, where you just drive into it and it completely rejects you.

Yet other times, touching the object's hitbox will put your car in a kind of stasis, where you just get physically frozen in place and will have to reset yourself back on track.

Trees, meanwhile, will often just "shift" your position to the side upon collision, allowing you to -kinda- drive through them, in the weirdest way possible. It's really, really janky and colliding with anything in this game is an experience.

The same thing also applies to collisions with the other cars. It often turns into a sort of contest where the game knows that the two cars can't occupy the same space at the same time, so it'll have to teleport one in front of the other. And in general, the game's AI drivers are an interesting bunch.

For one, they're not the sort of perfect drivers you see in some racing games. These guys make mistakes. They'll go off-track. They're like the AI drivers in Wreckfest. Almost mimicking the chaos of human players, but actually worse. In fact, we've even had a few occasions where an AI driver missed a checkpoint, but decided to carry on, which effectively put them out of the competition for the rest of the race.

See where those two AI cars are stuck on the left, there? At least one of them got stuck on that bit literally every single time we visited that particular track. Not sure how that happens. The AI doesn't -seem- to be on rails.

They also get upgraded and "level-matched" to the player in a curious way. The game will always make sure that opponents are in somewhat similar-performing cars as you, and yet you clearly gain an advantage over the AI as you upgrade your vehicle.

We can only presume that some upgrades are weighed differently when the game calculates the opponent's performance numbers as compared to your car. Or something similar. Some kind of curious calculation going on under the hood, anyway.

The point is that the more you upgrade your car, the more you'll start to really trounce the opposition. I mean, that seems reasonable, so it's probably working as intended.

As for the tracks, there's -loads- of 'em. 30, in fact. Some are fairly down-to-earth locations, like an offroad rally course in Costa Rica, while others are more fantastic, racing around an Air Force base or a big salvage yard.

The variety is pretty good, and many tracks have little details, like planes and helicopters flying near the track. On occasion, there's even dynamic obstacles, like a railroad crossing that actually has a train going by from time to time.

So all in all, racing in this game feels pretty janky, but it does have it's charm. Objectively good? No, not at all. But it doesn't necessarily have to be.

But then, there's something that's near and dear to Michael's heart, that that's the other thing you can do in career mode:

-Missions-

.... okay, so right away, imma have to ruin his nostalgia and tell you that frankly, these missions are nowhere near as big or involved as Michael remembers them.

Basically, there's 6 non-racetrack maps, which are more of a freeroaming-type design. On each of these, a number of missions are availabe (in sequence). Usually, those missions will involve being given a hand-drawn map of the area, with which you'll have to navigate and find something. The thing is, Michael remembers this as a whole big adventurous thing, but well, the reality of it is, if you're not a child who doesn't know any better, these missions are preeeeetty simple. In fact, one mission in particular involved like 30 seconds of driving because there's only one objective, and it's quite near the starting point.

Also, as you can see from the image above, the mission descriptions can be a bit.... "eccentric". Some of 'em get downright silly. Honestly, i don't think that's a bad thing. It might not quite be how Michael remembered it, but it's got character.

Doing these missions is ultimately quite worth it, not just because they're decently well paid (Well, some are, some aren't.), but also because it's generally a nice change of pace from the racing.

But with all that said, i wouldn't feel right about finishing a post about a game this nostalgic to Michael, so imma hand it back to him for our....

-Conclusion-

Right. Well, i'm obviously not gonna be mean to a game that i played so much as a kid, but eh, Amalia and i have found that ultimately, this game's..... not that great.

It's not objectively awful or anything, but let's say that child Michael got a lot more mileage out of this game than it would normally provide. He didn't know any better, and that's a good thing in this case.😜

If we somehow got you curious about playing it.... good luck. We could play it because we still have it on CD, but we looked around and found no way of buying it online. So if you -really- want to, you'll have to track down a physical copy.

But yeah, as much fun as we had revisiting such a core part of my childhood, neither of us think it'd be worth quite that much effort.

We'll also be releasing a few more races we recorded on YouTube. Feel free to check out this playlist!

So, we hope you enjoyed another little dive into my childhood. We've got plenty of old games we still want to revisit, along with some newer ones, so stick around! And in the meantime, stay safe, and have a good one!