Manage updates with the Download App
Making things even easier is the rubber-band artificial intelligence in the game. No matter how many short cuts you take or how well you race, the other three racers will always be right on your tail. You can run an opponent off the road or spin him around backward, and he'll somehow magically catch up within a few seconds. Conversely, you can fall behind by a considerable distance and easily catch up, as if your opponents decided to stop and wait for you.
The physics in the game are way off, too. Your Hummer bounces off of even the smallest bumps in the track, and instead of simulating the sway of the suspension on your vehicle, your tires simply melt into the ground as you drive over uneven terrain. There's also no collision detection on a lot of objects in the environment, so as you drive through some dense foliage or across a river, you'll see the branches, leaves, and water clip right through your vehicle.
The understated elegance of the H1 Patriot is, quite simply, frickin' awesome.
If you want to inflict this game upon a friend, you can play two-player split-screen in three different modes. You can have a head-to-head race, a pursuit race, or a tug-of-war match. In a pursuit race, you both start on opposite points in the track and try to catch up to your opponent. In tug of war, you basically hold the reverse button and try to drag your opponent across a line. In pursuit race and tug of war, both players have to use the same Hummer, which makes the competition even less exciting than it would be otherwise.
Hummer Badlands isn't worth your time, regardless of your affinity for the vehicles. The racing is easy and simplistic, and the off-road mode is too brief to be worthwhile. With so many great racing games on both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, this one might as well not even exist.
