Split Second



Split Second: Velocity (known as just Split Second in North America and commonly stylised, Split/Second) is an upcoming action-racing video game developed by Black Rock Studio and published by Disney Interactive Studios for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Revealed in March 2009, the game is scheduled to be released worldwide in May 18, 2010.

Gameplay
In Split Second: Velocity, players take part in a fictional reality television program where participants race for money and glory. Throughout a race, players can build up their "powerplay" meter by performing stunts such as jumps and precision driving such as passing very close to objects and drifting. As the player builds up their meter, special events can be triggered which create obstacles for other players, create shortcuts or alter the race course entirely.

Such events include explosions, airplane crashes and building collapses. The severity of the events available to trigger varies depending on how full the player's meter is. The first level of events are available when one of the three bars on the are full and the most extreme can only be triggered once all three are full. Event locations, and the vehicles they will affect, are highlighted with blue icons for the level one powerplays, and red icons for level two, and the player must time the action accurately in order to hinder his or her competitors as much as possible. One section of the powerplay meter resets once a level-one event is triggered, so the player must also strategise to choose whether to activate the less destructive first-level events as soon as they are available, or save their powerplay points for longer and build them up further in order to use the top-tier actions.

There are also certain powerplays that reset for the next lap, such as bombs dropped from helicopters, small environmental changes and secret shortcuts, but there will also be powerplays that will never reset, until the race is finished, restarted or quit. Black Rock Studios also wanted to make the HUD as simple as possible by taking away all unnecessary elements such as the speedometer and the track map (rendered useless due to the dynamic nature of the track) leaving only the lap count, position that the player is in and the powerplay meter, all dynamically positioned behind the car itself, so as to leave more room to display visuals.

Using the reality TV show premise, the game is broken up into 72 events across 12 episodes. One of the race modes in career and multiplayer has been revealed, called 'Nemesis' which replicates a scene from Terminator 2. While the player is racing along a given track, he or she must contend with a time limit and a series of trucks rolling coloured barrels out of the back to stop the player reaching the finish in time. Blue barrels takes away seconds and red barrels result in instant death, followed by a respawn. Overtaking a truck will add precious seconds to the timer. When the timer runs out, the game goes into a sudden death phase where the next fatal impact will end the race. Another career challenge has been dubbed, 'survival' where the player dodges incoming missile fire from a helicopter. The power-play gauge at this point now acts as a way to steer the missiles back at the helicopter, ultimately destroying it. The game has been confirmed to have multiplayer. 8-player online and 2-player split-screen offline.

A single player demo was released on Xbox Live Marketplace as of 26 April 2010, with a PlayStation 3 demo expected to be released May 11. The demo consists of a 3 lap race on the Airport Terminal level.