Road Blaster HD Review

Road Blaster HD is a port of the 1985 interactive laserdisc movie arcade game created by Data East. In this game, players take control of a vigilante driver who is bent on taking out the biker gang responsible for his wife's death. Although the game is very nicely animated and sounds great, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, making the game hard to recommend given its somewhat steep price tag.

In Road Blaster HD, players are presented with awesomely 80s animated scenes of a first-person action-packed car chase while being tasked with "maneuvering" their car so as not to crash. I say "maneuvering" because the control of the in-game car is far from 1:1. Rather, players will be given an on-screen prompt at specified times in each scene that will direct them to either steer left or right or speed up or slow down.

What this means is that Road Blaster HD is a great looking action sequence packed full of quicktime events. This may not bother some players accustomed to such gameplay styles, but in this game, I found the time window to complete each quick time event particularly small, making progression through each of the game's scenes rather frustrating. On top of this, the idea of being behind the wheel of a car and having such little control over it made the whole experience feel dissonant as well.

Although the revelation that Road Blaster HD has poor gameplay may not be surprising to those who are familiar with laserdisc games like Dragon's Lair, that does not change the fact that Road Blaster HD is not a particularly fun gaming experience. However, what the game lacks in interactivity it makes up for in its presentation. Fans of the genre may get a lot of mileage out of Road Blaster HD, but the game certainly is not for everyone.