Fast & Furious: Showdown

Fast & Furious: Showdown is a 2013 action-racing video game based on the Fast & Furious franchise. It was developed by Firebrand Games and published by Activision for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows, mh:awesomegames:Nintendo 3DS, mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 3, Wii U, and mh:awesomegames:Xbox 360.

Plot
Monica Fuentes finds Riley Hicks digging around through files in her office. Riley introduces herself and states she is going to meet Luke Hobbs in 24 hours and needs to know everything Hobbs has been up to. The missions are then events told by Monica to explain what Hobbs had been dealing with.

Gameplay
The game focuses on cooperative driving and car combat. The game is centered around different missions, all centered around driving around in semi-destructible loops. These missions can range from a normal race to surviving a certain number of laps.

Why It Doesn't Have the Family

 * 1) The graphics are absolutely terrible and horrendous (especially on the 3DS and Wii U) and look like a game shortly after the era of the first PlayStation and/or Dreamcast. It's worth noting that the game came out in 2013, instead of at least in 2002, or earlier. The textures look like they were made by a preschooler in Microsoft PowerPoint, the vehicles look like enlarged 1:36 scaled (possibly) Kinsmart pull-back die-cast toy counterparts with the most visible cheap plastic made in China, the cutscenes look like a college student project from the early 2000s, the animations are as stiff as the stiffest stick, special effects specifically can cause severe epileptic seizures, and the character models look like cheap grocery store potatoes.
 * 2) Lazily done main menu. The game shows a black background with the font from the cover art, no background, no animation, no title, or anything else. Despite the poor-looking main menu, yet they've added a lot of options, from video quality, changing effects to improve the processing power of your equipment, to key configuration, and volume.
 * 3) The plot is poorly written and feels like it was written for one hour by a high school student who, meanwhile, spent more time on smoking cigarettes and drinking a beer than inventing an ambitious plot.
 * 4) The physics here are as realistic as a cloud full of air. The car you drive in particular during the first mission can throw vehicles around like toy cars. Even if you're driving at the speed of a snail stuck in chewing gum, the other vehicle will still pass over above your car. Another noteworthy thing is the safe, which can even weigh a ton, but here it acts like an empty package.
 * 5) The driving model is horrendous, very archaic, and not realistic. Regardless of whether you drive an ordinary car, off-road vehicle, or even a Jeep, the vehicles are driven like cardboard boxes, covered to the brim with rubble on ice. Twisting is bizarre, and any collision with objects either ends in nothing for you, because the impact is not detected, or you bounce off the surface like a helium balloon.
 * 6) The game can be illogical. There is a situation in which opponents supposedly have huge magnets that make you stick to them with any contact, sometimes while leading or behind, the opponents unexpectedly collide with other elements of the movement.
 * 7) Monotonous and horrible possibly looped engine sounds, none of the cars feel like they sound like a car at all, all are weak and very unfitting to any car. In fact, the most notable example is the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.
 * 8) While there is an actual speedometer and even a small gear indicator HUD, there's no RPM display, which is unacceptable for 2013 driving game standards. However, RPM displays are not always required.
 * 9) Barely happening on every car, the rear tires' speed is limited, they can't go any faster, and are way off from the car's speed.
 * 10) The voice acting is also terrible and cringeworthy. Activision didn't even hire the original voice actors from the films. Instead, you will hear the rattling of amateurs who see a microphone for the first time, wondering what such equipment is actually doing and where it is going.
 * 11) Weak other sound effects that, for example, the collision, sound more like a modified plate-smashing sound rather than a collide with a car.
 * 12) All of the real-life licensed cars are basically Chrysler/FCA manufacturers, which can be disappointing.
 * 13) Shooting missions are such a disaster, as the gameplay quickly becomes boring after a tedious mission duration or incompetent opponents. For the game to try to be cool, while boring, time slows down for some unknown reason when defeating an opponent.
 * 14) Incredibly stupid artificial intelligence, even for a racing game:
 * 15) *Average opponent: The only tactic of your opponents is to stick to your side, and they don't care, if you overtake them without any problems.
 * 16) * Average policeman: They fall very often into each other's police cars, and when you want to hit them, they even run close to you to get hit as quickly as possible. Also, when they get hit in a larger group, they gracefully bump into each other spinning and spinning like drunkards.
 * 17) * Your teammate: The stupidest of all three, fourth degree disabilities. In shooting missions, when you take control of the weapon and your teammate steering the car, very often at unexpected moments you collide at the barriers, other vehicles standing carelessly on the highway, or driving on your lane, or slowing down without any reason, despite the fact that you perform the assigned at the moment a mission.
 * 18) Several bugs and glitches:
 * 19) * In some certain areas, you rarely fall into the ground. For example, most notably the desert texture in the Buenos Aires, etc.
 * 20) * Sometimes it happens that the camera goes into the ground when you stand too close to the edge on the map.
 * 21) * Sometimes it also happens that by finishing the race in second place, where it was impossible to catch up with the person in first place, the game for some reason claims that the mission has been completed.
 * 22) * Sometimes the shadows are not loaded.
 * 23) * After changing the settings, they do not work as they should at first.
 * 24) * The game crashes at times.
 * 25) Lack of faithfulness to the original source material. An early level recreates the vault scene from Fast Five but replaces Vin Diesel's character with Ludacris' character. Also, the problem, as previously mentioned in WIDHTF #9 pointer, is that the original voice actors aren't even featured. Ending on Dom Toretto himself, one of the most characteristic characters played by Vin Diesel, does not appear at all.
 * 26) The hit system in shooting missions is like Russian roulette. Either you kill with one shot, or you fire a series of shots and he's still alive. Sometimes shooting at the wheels from the side ends up in disaster, and sometimes when you shoot when someone is facing you, the car becomes a thing of the past.
 * 27) The missions with quick time event elements: At some points in the game, you have to jump onto an oncoming truck or Jeep to plant a bomb or simply to force the enemy driver to get out of the vehicle with the hands of your character. To do this, you need to press a key, get over your vehicle, keep the balance by pressing the action button mercilessly, jump on the vehicle, keep your balance again by spamming a space, move to a given enemy's vehicle and press enter to take control or plant a bomb. This is only what you have to do every time QTE elements appear.
 * 28) The mission of taking down explosive grenades thrown by enemies at a given truck quickly becomes boring and repetitive. Additionally, such a mission lasts as long as three minutes. Not to mention that the opponents are constantly throwing exploding packages in exactly the same places.
 * 29) There are only thirty missions in the game overall, and the last one they added is exactly the same as in the first mission. Everything is almost identical, from dialogues, scripts to elements of the surroundings and the route itself.
 * 30) The designs of the levels try to imitate open-world maps, but in reality, they consist of small areas where all of the missions take place, the only thing that makes them slightly different is that the game restricts the maps according to the kind of mission. Some of the levels even recycle the same specific areas, but in backwards.
 * 31) Some of the levels are not accurate to the era or geographic zone where the game takes place:
 * 32) * According to one of the cutscenes, the Mexican mission takes place in a zone that in reality is too far away from the real-life existing highways (Probably taking place in San Luis Potosi or Zacatecas), but even if the level was probably based on some of those nearby highways and it doesn't have to be 100% realistic, the level is still inaccurate because many signals in the level show up cities that are too far away from the previously mentioned position, like Mazatlan (Which is located in the western part of the country, while the other states are in the east). This level is also anachronic because in the landscapes the player can appreciate several wind farms, in real life, those wind farms were built three years in the aforementioned states after the game was released.
 * 33) * The case of the Buenos Aires' levels is even worse because the vehicles of the cops use an emblem showing up the Peruvian territory on the sides. In case that you don't know, Argentina is not even next to Peru and the characters that participate in that mission's mention that they have stolen a car from a base of the Argentinian Police Department.
 * 34) The challenge mode is an obvious grind in which you have to complete the same tasks, such as:
 * 35) * Driving through the gate with a camera at the fastest speed possible.
 * 36) * Staying on the road, defeating enemy's vehicles appearing out of nowhere.
 * 37) * Drifting.
 * 38) Car modification is totally cheesy and is only limited to cosmetic elements. The only thing the game has to offer is to change the color of the car, rims and decals. In addition, to improve them, you need to collect points that you receive in a given mission in the campaign or in the challenge mode.
 * 39) Despite having thirty missions in total, the campaign length is extremely short, lasting between two and three hours.
 * 40) Just like Crossroads, the game costed over $40 at launch, which is absolutely too high for an extremely low-quality game.
 * 41) And to top it all off, there's no updates and new additions.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Catchy soundtrack, although they mainly include dubstep and raps.
 * 2) Some cars are enjoyable, such as the Flip Car from Fast & Furious 6, which is unintentionally hilarious due to the poor physics.
 * 3) The console versions and PC version somewhat have a bit better graphics, and less bugs/glitches.

Critical reception
Fast & Furious: Showdown was met with an overwhelmingly negative reception from both critics and users alike. On Metacritic, the Xbox 360 version received 22/100 and the PlayStation 3 version received 21/100.

Nintendo Life gave for the Wii U version a 2/10, summarizing: "Perhaps this game was developed in just a few months by an under-funded and over-stretched team, who knows. What we do know is that Fast & Furious: Showdown is one of the worst retail titles we've played in a long time and does nothing but bring discredit to Activision as its publisher. If blasting through over 30 repetitive stages with awful physics, stiff controls and abysmal visuals is your idea of fun, then you're doing this video game hobby thing wrong, and you may like this."

Metro GameCentral gave for the Xbox 360 version a 1/10, in short, they described that the game is a "cynically awful movie tie-in that is not just a terrible racing game but squanders the potential of it source material in almost criminal fashion." In summary, the advantage they mentioned was that the game is short (because for them it's a bad game, hence is an "advantage") and the disadvantage was that this game exists at all.

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