Year of construction: 2010
Genre: Arcade / Racing (Cars) / 3D
developer : Bizarre Creations
Publisher: Activision
Publisher in Russia: 1C-SoftKlab
System requirements for maximum rendering quality recommended by the gameGPU website:
The minimum
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: 2 Core Duo 2,66 GHz or Athlon 64 x2 6000+
RAM: 1.5 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 256 MBRAM Radeon HD 3850 or GeForce 8800GS
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 7.3 GB free space
Effective
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: 2 Core Duo 3.16 GHz or Phenom II X2 550
Memory: 2 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MB RAM Radeon HD 3870 or GeForce GT 240
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 7.3 GB free space
Optimal
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Quad 3.0 GHz or Phenom II X4 940
RAM: 2 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MBRAM Radeon HD 4850 orGeForce GTS 250
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 7.3 GB free space
Official description of the game
Blur is both an exciting, adrenaline-fuelled racing game and an ever-evolving social network. Crazy races with dashing maneuvers, search for alternative routes, dizzying jumps and spectacular accidents await you. At the same time, by participating in races, you not only fight for victory on the track, but also make new friends, find serious rivals and even find your own fans! Blur connects players in both the virtual and real world.
In addition to the story mode, Blur offers unlimited opportunities for collective competition. Up to 20 racers can participate in online competitions, including team ones, and four can play on one screen at once. Moreover, the number of possible modes is practically unlimited. Custom Groups technology allows everyone to design races according to their own rules – this is how new collective modes are born and become available to everyone. The variety here is limited only by the imagination of the players themselves!
Features:
* Exercise for the mind. Collect charges right on the track and combine them to develop effective tactics: eliminate opponents from the path using mines, impulses, electric shock and lightning, turn on acceleration, set up shields and use repair kits – all means are good on the way to victory!
*Everything is for real. More than fifty licensed cars of popular brands, recreated in the smallest detail: Audi, Ford, Nissan, Renault, Opel, Volkswagen, Toyota and others – from retro to ultra-modern models. Each car has its own pros and cons, each has unique features that will allow you to perform the most risky and spectacular maneuvers.
* There is an opponent – there will be a race. Blur offers multiplayer modes to suit every taste: split-screen races for four players, online competitions and team racing for twenty participants. But the most important thing is that each player can independently create a network mode taking into account their own preferences.
* Fun for communication. The game is compatible with popular social networks Facebook and Twitter. This unique feature allows you to communicate via messages – both in the game and outside of it: unite with friends in teams, find worthy opponents, share your achievements with fans and invite them as spectators to competitions, and also find out about all the events that take place in the world of Blur.
Review: Playability
The month of May is always very busy with all sorts of events, holidays and… racing games. Before the thunder and explosions in Split Second had died down, Blur arrived to us. The publisher of this product was the eminent Activision, which not so long ago stated that the excitement of modern racing is hampered by hyper-realism and naturalness, and its brainchild in the person of Blur should raise their interactivity to a new level. But the publisher forgot that competitors were not asleep, and a week before the release of Blur, its direct opponent Split Second was released. Next, we will try to find out what these two races have in common, what differences there are between them and which, in the end, is better.
The games have one thing in common – to prevent your opponents from reaching the finish line before you, using various “dirty methods”. In Blur, we directly influence players: we shoot them with different charges, push them away from ourselves with a blast wave, lay mines, slow them down with an electric shock, or apply hyper acceleration to our car. In Split Second, we influence enemies indirectly, through the destruction of the surrounding world, forcing them to become victims of a large-scale disaster. Instead of experience in Blur, we collect fan points, which allow us to unlock upgrades and new levels. As we can see, both games are very similar in spirit to each other.
The controls in the game are arcade-style, and as in the case of Split Second, you will not need serious driving skills. Instead of an empty driver’s seat in Blur, we have our own character constantly tossing and turning during the race. It’s a shame, but you can’t choose him and we’ll only see him during the race. A huge advantage of this game is the licensed fleet of cars. And if in Split Second the cars were copies of modern sports cars, then here real models await us. Cars in Blur do not crash immediately, but after reaching the accumulation level of damage, but no matter how sadly large-scale accidents you will not be destined to see.
We invite you to check out the Blur racing video, where you can see for yourself the quality of this product:
And although Blur and Split Second look like twin sisters, the second looks much more attractive than the first. After completing the Disney game, the Blur arcade will not be able to interest you in anything. It looks poorer and more boring compared to its competitor. After a few races, the game quickly becomes boring and does not provide even the slightest incentive to continue playing. Although it is quite possible that those players who did not like Split Second will find their happiness here…
Review: Game Graphics
The game graphics in Blur, to be honest, were a little disappointing. In game videos we were shown an almost cinematic image, but at the end we got a cartoon image. The situation is further aggravated by the almost identical presence of tracks that are as similar as two peas in a pod to those from Split Second. In the second they look much nicer. Even with the naked eye it is clear that the Disney product is ahead of its opponent by a head.
Cartoon graphics, lack of large-scale special effects, and low detail design completely discourage any interest in this game. The only thing that might interest you is the range of colorful flowers surrounding the cars. Although this same feature in some cases may scare you away.
In the case of Split Second, we received large-scale requirements for video cards, and now we will find out whether Blur was able to outperform its competitor in this regard.
Review: Resource-intensive game
To play Blur comfortably, you will need a Core 2 Duo 3.16 GHz or Phenom II X2 550 3.10 GHz processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM. The game is not very demanding on RAM, but it showed considerable interest in the central processor, loading four overclocked cores to 80%. This is, of course, not a fact that the game will slow down on weaker systems, but to fully unlock the potential of a top-end card, a high-frequency multi-core friend will be needed.
|
Hardware configuration |
|
| Processor |
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550@ 4.25 GHz L2 cache 12 MB, |
| Motherboard | MSI P45 Platinum 7512 (LGA 775) P45/ICH10R |
| Memory | 4 GB OCZ DDR2-1150 @ 11160, 5-5-5, 2,2 V |
| Video Cards |
GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB |
| HDD | 2 RAID0 Western Digital Caivar WD2500GL 250 GB, 7200 rpm, SATA 3 Gbit/s |
|
System software and drivers |
|
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64 |
| DirectX | DirectX 11 |
| Platform Driver | Intel INF Chipset Update Utility 9.1.0.1012 |
| Graphics driver |
Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 257.15 beta ATI Catalyst 10.4 |
All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using the Fraps program. the most resource-intensive place in the game.
Our video cards are tested generally in all different screen sizes, and you can evaluate how your video card behaves relative to other modern solutions in almost all different gaming screen sizes. All video cards were tested with maximum quality graphics settings. As in Split Second, the graphic settings are not very diverse – the graphics level is adjusted in several modes. The only outlet is the manual adjustment of anti-aliasing up to 8X.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1024×768
Everything is much better than in Split Second. To run the game at maximum settings at a resolution of 1024×768, you will need at least a Radeon HD 3850 or GeForce 8800 GS level card, which is quite decent, although a bit too much for racing games…
Testing at maximum quality settings 1280×1024
When permissions were increased, the balance of power did not change. A resolution of 1280×1024 will require you to have such video cards as Radeon HD 3870 or GeForce GT 240.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1680×1050
When switching to widescreen resolution, a minimum for the game it becomes Radeon HD 4830 or GeForce 9800 GT.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080
With Full HD, the gaming appetite increases to such mid-level cards as the Radeon HD 5750 or GeForce 8800 GTX. The Radeon HD 4850 or GeForce GTS 250 can provide the most comfortable game without noticeable drops in FPS, which is quite suitable for modern graphics standards.
Conclusion: We expected more from Activision, but apparently it wasn’t chasing beautiful graphics. Their goal was to take the racing series to a new level of perception. The competitor, Split Second, can be said to have reduced all their efforts to zero, presenting more driving gameplay and excellent graphics. The only thing Blur can boast of is more democratic requirements for the video system.
We thank the company MSI and in particular Alexey Kalinovsky in assisting in obtaining video cards MSI GeForce GTX 470 1280 MB и MSI GeForce GTX 480 1536 MB for our GPU performance tests.
You can discuss the game at forum.