So far so good. The 'race campaign' as they call it is a kind of nice switch up from the WO standard of 'here are some races, beat them to unlock a tournament'. Now you have a hexagonal grid with each hex representing an event (there are a couple variations on time trial, your standard race, and zone). When you first open a grid, only a couple of the hexes are available, the rest are locked. Placing in the event unlocks all the adjacent hexes, opening more events. Each event is also worth a number of points, get more points to unlock a new grid. Groovy system, a bit more engaging than the standard.
So far really digging Assegai. Interesting this time around they have an experience system for each ship. They call it 'loyalty' and you get points in it for every lap you completed in the race (regardless of if you win or not), with a multiplier based on your difficulty. That's right - difficulty. This is the first WO to feature difficulty - every race defaults to medium, and after you beat it you have the option to play it again on Easy, Medium, or Hard. The levels actually seem well tuned so far, although I'm only two grids in. As a seasoned WO vet, I gold Medium difficulty on my first or second try, and can compete on hard once I know the track well enough.
Speaking of tracks, they managed to back-integrate the interesting parts of the otherwise mediocre WO: Fusion from PS2 into the 'real' games - the loops, corkscrews and upside-down track-above-track stuff is all here, and feels much better than Fusion did. Haven't seen any of the 'outdoor' stuff - thank god.
So far, no big complaints. People wondering about performance - it doesn't seem to have the framerate hit that WO: Pure had when it got a few opponents on screen and weapons being fired. Races with opponents seem pretty steady at 30fps, races without seem to run mostly at 60fps except in the parts with insane special effects (bloom and transparencies all over the place for example). Curious to see how it does in wi-fi multi, as WO: Pure fps absolutely plummeted in that situation.
That's most of my impressions/observations so far. Oh, and the zone events now occur on the same tracks as the regular races. You still get the groovy zone texture palette that makes it look like VR, though. Also, it now tells you how fast you're going in terms of the different speed tiers while you're flying along in zone, i.e. 'sub-venom', 'venom', 'sub-rapier', 'rapier', etc. Quite cool near the beginning, gives you a good feel for how fast the game is going to get on the top speed tier.
I've got to give the custom soundtrack option a shot. Cowgirl would rock on this game.
