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Characters

Snake Sanders

  • Homeland: Terra
  • Skills: Acceleration, Top Speed

Snake is the game's speed demon. However, he'll have handling problems early in the game with all that speed but no cornering, so he is definitely not good for newbies.

Cyberhawk

Ivanzypher

Katarina Lyons

Jake Badlands

  • Homeworld: Xeno Prime
  • Skills: Acceleration, Cornering

Jake is the best character for a new player. Cornering is a solid trait, because being able to turn corners quickly and reliably without losing much speed will gain much more overall speed than a higher top speed. This combined with acceleration is great, since when you do make a mistake and slow down, you can recover quickly.

Tarquinn

Olaf (secret!)

  • Homeworld: Valhalla
  • Skills: Acceleration, Top Speed, Cornering

A combination of Snake and Jake with no weaknesses. Obviously, there would be little reason not to pick Olaf if he weren't a secret character, as he has the top three abilities. Of course, because of this he is unbalanced with the other characters, so using him is sort of "cheating".

Cars

Be warned that when you buy a new car, you will lose all your upgrades for your previous car. You cannot sell your upgrades or your old car, so buying a new car is a big, but necessary, investment.

Dirt Devil

  • Cost: $18,000
  • Armaments:
    • Offense (Y): VK Plasma Rifles
    • Defense (X): BF's Slipsauce
    • Assist (Y): Locust Jump Jets

Slower than Marauder, better handling.

Marauder

  • Cost: $18,000
  • Armaments:
    • Offense (Y): VK Plasma Rifles
    • Defense (X): BF's Slipsauce
    • Assist (Y): Locust Jump Jets

Faster than Dirt Devil, looser handling

Generally prefer the Marauder to the Dirt Devil, especially if your character has the cornering skill.

Air Blade

  • Cost: $70,000
  • Armaments:
    • Offense (Y): Rogue Missiles
    • Defense (X): Bear Claw Mines
    • Assist (Y): Lightning Nitros

Far superior to the Dirt Devil and Marauder: a Marauder with hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrades still performs somewhat weakly against an unadorned Air Blade. For this reason you will not want to upgrade your Marauder or Dirt Devil much until you get the Air Blade. The armaments are also a lot better: nitros are far more useful than jump jets, mines are more useful than slipsauce, although still not very good, and the rogue missiles are the most powerful weapons in the game, easily able to destroy an enemy vehicle with a couple hits (especially with the weak armor early in the game).

Battle Trak

  • Cost: $110,000
  • Armaments:
    • Offense (Y): Rogue Missiles
    • Defense (X): KO Scatterpack
    • Assist (Y): Lightning Nitros

You'll want this on Bogmire, since the planet is very muddy and this car uses treads. For this reason, you also don't need to spend money on tires, so getting the Battle Trak is where characters with loose handling like Snake start to shine. The Scatterpacks are an improvement upon the Bear Claw Mines and are the best drop weapon in the game. You'll have your Battle Trak for a while, so you can afford to upgrade it pretty heavily, but you'll need to start saving up for a Havac when you're on New Mojave.

Havac

  • Cost: $130,000
  • Armaments:
    • Offense (Y): Sundog Beams
    • Defense (X): KO Scatterpack
    • Assist (Y): Lightning Nitros

By the time you get to Nho, where you'll need it, you should have enough money to buy this, which you should. On top of not needing tires, now you won't need shock absorbers. The Sundog Beams are a mixed bag compared to the Rogue Missiles you've surely grown to love. The Sundog Beams track enemy cars (like heat-seeking missiles), but they're somewhat slow and don't do much damage. If you're going to bother with them, you should upgrade to maximum capacity, seven beams, which will often prove not enough to blow up just one car by this point in the game. However, if your enemy has already sustained heavy damage, or you can pop in front with some Scatterpacks afterwards, they are still useful.

Races

Chem VI

This is where you start the game. You can't race without a car, but you only have $20,000, which means you must buy the Dirt Devil or Marauder. As discussed in cars above, the Marauder is usually the better deal.

We recommend not upgrading your vehicle at all and going straight for the Air Blade. You will probably not make it through Division B on your first time through (on the higher difficulty settings), but that often will not change whether you upgrade your vehicle or not. You should be able to buy an Air Blade on your second time through Division B, or if not, your third time. Once you do, you'll have no trouble getting through the remaining races on Chem VI, even in division A, with no further upgrades. But do upgrade your Air Blade when you can afford it until Drakonis (where you'll upgrade a bit more, then save up for the Battle Trak). You'll want to buy Rhino Skin, some plasma rifle shots, and possibly a new engine, but you won't really need the engine upgrade until Drakonis.

An alternative is to skip the Air Blade and keep upgrading the Marauder, but this is a very expensive proposition as a heavily upgraded Marauder will still underperform compared to an Air Blade. On the whole, buying an Air Blade and upgrading that instead will probably be both easier and cheaper.

You will probably get more than the required points in Division A before you complete all the races. This gives you the option to go to Captain Braddock to go to the next planet. Keep racing anyway! You have nothing to lose, but free money to gain... which you can use to upgrade your car, and that's always useful no matter how sick you get of the tracks here.

Drakonis

Remember that the Battle Trak costs $110,000, and that's how much you will want at minimum when you finish Division A, since you'll want the Battle Trak on Bogmire. It's not a requirement, but it helps. If you like, upgrade as little as possible and only buy upgrades when it's apparent you'll need to in order to win enough races to get the points you need.

Bogmire

New Mojave

Nho

Inferno

This is where the game gets tough. You may well find it somewhat comparable to your struggle on Chem IV way back at the beginning of the game, but it won't quite be that bad. On some tracks there are reverse warp arrows which send you rocketing backward, probably costing you more victories than anything else. Your opponents will all be sporting Havacs, and they'll be powerful, so you will no longer have the technological edge. That means relatively minor mistakes become much more serious here, and this why hitting a reverse warp arrow can ruin the race for you. On top of all this, the track layouts can be somewhat confusing.

If you get more than the required points in Division A before the end, there's no reason to continue racing. Go directly to Captain Braddock, sit down, strap in, shut up, and watch the ending. :)

Trivia

The songs in the game are:

  • Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood
  • Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf
  • Highway Star by Deep Purple
  • Paranoid by Black Sabbath
  • Peter Gunn by Henry Mancini