Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships Review (no fat)

Game Description

Any horse racing fan will be drooling to get his hands on Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships and experience the fun associated with the elite horse racing championship… taking the reigns of your own bred champion would truly be a dream-come-true. The stakes are as high as you allow them to be in this race of the finest, and in the end there can only be one greatest of all time.

When such high expectations greet a game, its tough to bring the tent down, but someone has to do the job.

Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships Gameplay

Although a budget game, Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships comes with a respectable amount of game modes including Quick Race, a Day at the Race, Challenge a Champion, and Career Mode. Quick race is aptly suited for some easy practice, as players jump straight into the track and can get their timing down. However, the racing is just too easy to serve Quick Race as anything more than an initial weaning ground.

A Day at the Race covers the gambling side of the game, and involves players placing bets on who they think will win the race. The betting options are impressive and will be familiar territory for regulars of real life horse racing. Exacta, trifecta, pick 4,5,6 etc. the list is extensive enough to make a gambling fiend out of even the youngest individual. The mode doesn’t come without a downside though, it is restrictive in the sense that your winnings can not be utilized on anything except for more bets…

And the joy that is Career mode is the whole enchilada of horse racing letting you be the owner, breeder, and gambler. The most fun will come out of choosing whom to breed your horse with, although the stripped functionality of naming your horse will become a real nasty thorn later on. After getting a generic name for your new horse from the AI, you can set up a race for it, and pick from a list of jockeys to hire out.

Even the Career mode isn’t anything to be inspired with. A bit of thought would have suggested that better jockeys should demand more payment than average ones. However, in the world of Breeders Cup World, the jockey union decided on equality for all…or so we think. So ultimately, choosing a jockey means scrolling through stats instead of keeping economy in mind as well. Very unrealistic indeed.

Challenge a champion is going to be a definite favorite of horse racing fans, allowing them to challenge past greats and see where they stand against these legends. There are more horses to challenge in this mode once they are unlocked through Career mode but then again, why torture yourself with such lousy gameplay?

If anything else could go wrong, its fair to believe that the actual longevity of the title is shortened by easy, childlike gameplay and uninspiring graphics.

Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships - Easy Peasy

When gamers are done setting up for a race they have the option of placing the bet on the winning horse, and controlling their own horse. Since the game really doesn’t offer a real challenging level of play, the obvious choice would be to bet on yourself and control your own horse. After winning your first race (which you probably will) the game unloads unheard of wealth onto you, allowing you to pretty much dominate at will.

To its credit, Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships does a great job of trying to keep the play fresh with stat building training, cups to win, and realism with the random injuries. But it fails in that none of these are really interactive and should’ve been, like the training. This makes everything a bit too canned for the common player and unfairly takes out what could have been rewarding gaming elements.

The racing your horse functions are nothing more than hit the button to begin the race at the right time, and from then on out it is knowing your horses pace and playing to his strengths. The little interactivity involved is a bit too rehearsed, with the AI telling you when to press a button.

Common Sense…the uncommon

It is baffling to the mind how little things pass professional game makers, such as simple simulate game options that have been around since the PSX days. Gamers will have to manually scroll through the list of races for a day to find out which one they are competing in, with no way of fully bypassing races to get to yours.

You can bypass a race somewhat, but you have to sit through a winning screen (which is repeated each time round), stats for that race, and a couple of button presses. This is aggravating and really doesn’t make any sense, especially with the lack of a filter to help players organize anything.

Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships Graphics

The graphics engine is not innovative at all, and really leaves a lot of room for detail. In fact there is a huge gap left for detail, apparent when the game has one of its few weather conditions. The electric and screaming fans associated with sports titles are missing from this game, and they are replaced with what could pass for something from the 16 bit era.

Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships Sound

It might as well have been in mono, the quality is a tad bit low for a next generation console. Some background effects provide a little hope, but they are few and far between. The announcer in this game should also shut up the mouths of gamers who bash the Capcom announcer, Tom Durkin’s commentating in BCW is a miracle cure for insomnia.

Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships - Summing up

It is always fun to see developers try to branch out to other genres, but it is a serious trial and error process with Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships … for the moment, they have banged head on into what a game should NOT be, i.e. painfully easy, torturously time wasting, and the perfect antidote to cure any genre-fanatic fans out of their addiction.

Breeders Cup World Thoroughbred Championships cost

BCW retails for $17.99 at the time of this review (…which is exactly $17.99 more than what this game is worth.)