ShockRods Review

Have you ever wanted a version of Rocket League that includes guns? Maybe you’ve had the thought of, “Hey, Forza would be so much better with people driving around shooting each other!” I personally have never had these thoughts, but does the general concept seem exciting? Well, keep reading to get my take.

ShockRods is an arena-style, car racing, shoot ‘em up. The game was developed by Stainless Games, who are known for making games such as Carmageddon and Magic: The Gathering, however, this isn’t their first attempt at this style of game. The aforementioned Carmageddon series is essentially the same game as ShockRods but is lesser-known.

Let’s start off by talking about the game modes, and the lack of. The game has four modes that you can play offline with bots: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture The Flag and Golden Ram. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are classic modes of any FPS type game, however this isn’t an FPS and as such you wouldn’t expect these modes to be featured when there are only four modes available overall. Capture The Flag works nicely here however, this is just retreading territory that has been done in plenty of FPS games. If ShockRods featured unique game modes that were fun to play this review would be totally different, however the only unique game mode is Golden Ram. This mode has you trying to pick up an item box that spawns in the center of the map when the game starts. Whoever picks up this item has a great big ram stuck to the front of their car and has a lot of health, the objective of this mode is simple, you must kill the car that has the golden ram attached to the front of it. While this mode is unique and offers something different from standard game modes I found that this mode gets extremely boring fast.

Okay, so there are major issues present in this title and one of the issues is the player count. While I was reviewing this game, I was unable to find an online match that took more than five minutes to find enough players and load into the game, it doesn’t sound too bad right? Well once I found myself in an online match the lag was unbearable, my ping was everywhere and my car was being flung back and forth like a yo-yo. Due to this, I found myself playing against bots offline, which got incredibly boring real fast. this is due to the bot’s frustratingly dumb AI, even at the highest difficulties I still found that the bots were not doing much. When the bots finally did start killing each other it didn’t matter as we were already a quarter of the way through the match.

Let’s talk about the graphics and the recommended specs for this title. This game has recommended specs of a GTX 1060, and an Intel i7 CPU. This is ridiculous considering that the graphics for this game are outdated and look like they belong in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era of gaming. I am playing this game on ultra settings at 1080p and the game does definitely not require those recommended specs: I was using a GTX 980 at ultra and was hitting well over 60FPS.

This title has seven maps and hopefully has a lot more maps planned post-launch. The maps here are some of the worst that I have ever seen in an arena-style game, they make no sense in design and really do just flow badly. All of the action takes place in very small areas of these sometimes quite big maps, it feels like it was going to allow a big number of players to be on a map at one time but somewhere through development they decided to lower the player count.