Yeah, I don’t know what to think of Smashing Drive anymore. Hmm, maybe I do. How about this: It’s terrible; you should play it. No, hold on, this is complicated. It’s a horrible concept that’s well executed. No, it’s not that either. It’s like a racing game developed by someone whose only understanding of video games comes from what was described to them by their kids.

Smashing Drive is just such a simple not-thrill. The game is a complete flash. Initially released in 2000, it feels like the next level of Cruis’n USA. A nutrition-devoid snack with loud music and garish colours but no actual value. But if you actually peel back its vapid exterior, you’ll find it has so much personality it oozes out its pores.

UP AND RUNNING

Smashing Drive is a game about driving a taxi. Except, it’s not like Crazy Taxi. At all. Let me paint a picture for you: the opening demo features a scene where it zooms in on your taxi perched atop one of the gargoyles on the Chrysler Building like it’s fucking Batman. It then leaps off and plummets toward the city, presumably to start its shift. I don’t know who thought this looked cool, but they were absolutely right.

As I said, it’s more like Cruis’n USA; a linear racing game down restrictive tracks. Your cab is some retro-futuristic armored car, and you collect power-ups along the way that essentially weaponize it. You’re a yellow cab driving fares through New York City, so in order to actually get anyway through traffic, you get equipped with things like buzzsaws, monster truck tires, cowcatchers, and rocket boosters.

The whole part about delivering a fare is largely cosmetic. You have to take them from the starting line to the finish line while trying to outdrive an opponent. You don’t have to find your way through the city, it’s a linear track. It’s a bit like a… hm, what do you call it..? A race. It’s a race.

It’s also a slow race. Despite your cab looking like you’re from the future, everything is just modern times, and its speedometer caps out at 62mph. Definitely too fast for urban traffic, but a lot slower than you’d expect from a racing game. However, if you’re just driving, you’re doing things wrong. In fact, if you keep your four wheels planted on the ground and simply focus on dodging traffic, you’re going to lose.

STAY ON THE SIDEWALK, GRANDMA

Instead, the strategy here is to seek out shortcuts. Some are pretty obvious. Ramps will have lines of green arrows going up them. The power-ups are also contained in absolutely massive bubbles that you can see from a mile away. Even if you don’t see the shortcut leading to them, it’s pretty obvious when you’re in the vicinity of one. So, if you have to drive the track again, you know where you should be looking for ways to go offroading.

Other shortcuts are a bit better hidden. Walls might need to be knocked down, but at their most exotic, you need to first find a nearby buzzsaw so you can cut through important infrastructure and other vehicles to get to your destination faster.

And some of these shortcuts are just bizarre. Shortcuts through narrow drainage tunnels are routine here, but others have you driving across dinosaur fossils, plowing through burning buildings, or leaping over helicopters. The strangest one has you strap on boosters to chase King Kong up the side of a building.

The weird thing is the narrow tracks and focus on shortcuts is very entertaining. Even while the tracks are largely linear, you need to always be looking for ways to optimize your route. One shortcut might lead to another, or taking one detour may cause you to miss taking an even shorter one. The fact that they’re often just completely bonkers is just gravy.

SMASH THIS TOWN

What I find really enthralling about Smashing Drive is its strange, dreamlike presentation. Both arcade and survival modes are separated into four “shifts.” There’s Early Bird, Rush Hour, Night Owl, and finally, the amphetamines start taking a toll on your mental health, and you wind up in Dusk and Wired. The first three shifts are separated into three different routes, while Dusk and Wired is just one long track back through a lot of parts of town you travelled through in other shifts before you end by climbing the Statue of Liberty.

The city is surprisingly believable. The game is set during winter months, and you pass by all sorts of real-world locations that are represented with little fanfare. In the later shifts, you get a sense for the evening. The sky turns purple, and the lights become vibrant. The faster your cab travels, the more the game’s perspective distorts, becoming more and more fish-eyed. The art design in this game is deceptively impressive.

And the soundtrack is just so bizarrely terrible. It’s a set of songs that are essentially about the game itself. If generative AI was more mature back then, I would assume that a robot had written the songs. They have this weird reverb, overdub quality to them. The lyrics are sung with a light accent that makes the words difficult to discern most of the time. Just listen to it. Who were these bands? Did they know the mission? Hold on, let me see if I can find out…

Nope. Nothing. Well, not nothing. The music was done by Joan Sanmarti and Tomas Lorenzo. If they’re proud of their work on Smashing Drive they buried it underneath all their other accomplishments.

DUSK AND WIRED

I find myself breathless whenever I find myself talking about Smashing Drive. My words fail me. It’s the sort of game you just have to see and play. Being an arcade game originally, it’s, like, 45 minutes long. There’s even an offensively impressive Game Boy Advance port that retains essentially everything about the game perfectly. It’s a port – not even scaled down. The graphics just suck, but they’re still monstrously well done for the handheld.

I played it originally in, like, 2002. For some reason, it stuck in my mind for decades. The Dusk and Wired shift, chasing King Kong up a skyscraper; it was a short rental but these images were burned into my mind until years later when I decided to pick it up again. I then learned and understood why I remembered it so well.

As a bit of an aside, the copy I rented would have been from Blockbuster Video. When I bought it years later, it was in the same town. The copy I own has BBV markings on it, so it’s possible that I actually have the same copy I rented over 20 years ago.

Circling back to how I started this review: I don’t know what I think of Smashing Drive anymore. I would be hard-pressed to explain why it’s good – it might not be, I don’t even know anymore – but I can only describe how it’s strange and unique. Frankly, those are two things that are extremely important to me when it comes to how I rate games, so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m so enamored. Do I recommend it? Yeah, no, you should definitely play it.

8/10

This review was conducted on a GameCube using a disc copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.