Micro Machines World Series

Fun racer with adorable tracks and toy cars, that suffers from his online focus and technical problems.

The Pillars of the Earth shares many similarities with adventure games from Telltale: there are no puzzles per se, inventory management is simple to a fault, so the player mostly gets to choose responses in dialogues. There are points of divergence, but the differences between story branches are negligible; on the other hand, if the developers began changing events of the novel from the get-go, we would end up with a very different story. [Issue #222, p.55]

This revival of the miniature racer has a promising core, but poorly-handled multiplayer and a lack of replayability leave it sputtering on the starting grid. Micro Machines World Series might fulfill a night of local matches, but that’s about the extent of its strengths.

I respect that Micro Machines World Series is an ambitious game that attempt some legitimately cool ideas, some of which bring it pretty close to being a really cool game. I do believe that there was a legitimately high amount of thought that went into this game, and it’s a shame that most all of these good ideas are ultimately fruitless due to the nature of the game itself, buckling under its own design. Perhaps if there was a more lively online community it’d be worth finding a group of friends to develop some tactics and strategy with, but as it stands this is a title that’s going to be disappointing for most.

It looks nice, and it’s fun to play for a short while - but it’s such a pallid production that it just feels like a shadow of the game it could have been. Micro Machines deserves better.