The aforementioned handling model is a bit twitchy for my tastes and a step backward from the more refined handling found in Toybox Turbos, but that’s just a personal opinion – I’m sure many purists will appreciate the return to the classic handling of the Mega Drive era games. It’s not much fun on your own of course, but with a group of friends and a few beers, there are very few games out there that can match its simplistic, but utterly compelling sense of entertaining mayhem. With all four racers on screen at the same time, that brilliant, panic-inducing gameplay remains as addictive and enjoyable as ever. There have been a few subtle changes to the formula, but for the most part, this is exactly how you remember it. When playing in ‘Elimination’ mode (essentially the mode that everyone remembers from Mega Drive era Micro Machines), everything here is hunky-dory. It’s still an enjoyable game of course, and there is plenty of fun to be had in local multiplayer mode, but despite these moments of brilliance, this feels like a disappointingly, and at times, bewilderingly missed opportunity. Instead, they have moved the emphasis away from the game mode that everyone loves, removed a shed load of content and changed the handling model to one closer to that of the original game (not as awesome as it sounds). It really is a shame as, other than the license, Toybox Turbos was probably as close to a modern day Micro Machines as we have had for quite some time – a new lick of paint, a bit of refinement, slap on the Micro Machines licence and Codemasters would have surely been onto a winner. The recently released Toybox Turbos was a decidedly solid attempt to harness that old 16-bit magic, and while Micro Machines World Series really should have been the fully licensed equivalent of that game (seeing that both games are made by Codemasters and all), a number of poor design choices and some bizarre omissions keep this game from delivering the kind of high quality nostalgia fans of the original will have been hoping for. Mashed on PS2 and the original Xbox did a pretty good job of replicating the formula for a new generation of gamers, as did its own spiritual sequel, the somewhat underrated, Wrecked: Revenge Revisited, but man, for every half-decent attempt to bring this somewhat unique sub-genre back from the dead, there are an array of well-intentioned stinkers that wildly miss the mark. It delivered one of the all-time great local multiplayer templates, one which, for some strange reason, has very rarely been duplicated. Everyone loved Micro Machines on the Mega Drive, right? I loved it, heck, even my non-gamer friends loved it.
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