The best racing game in the catalog
WipEout Omega Collection, speed as the only subject
- Critic score
- 85
- Player rating
- 4.4/5
- Main story
- 14.7 h
- Genre
- Racing
Three games in one, antigravity craft, and no concession to simulation. It is the highest racing score in the catalog, and probably the most demanding.
The collection brings together WipEout HD, its Fury expansion and WipEout 2048, rebuilt for PS4. This is not a straight port: textures were entirely reworked, to the point that you can read the lettering on the ships' hulls for the first time.
WipEout has nothing to do with car racing. The craft float, barely brake, and the track rears up, banks and turns over. Driving rests on two techniques: the airbrakes, which let you pivot through a corner without shedding speed, and pitch control, which handles changes in altitude. Mastering them is the price of admission; without them you hit walls.
There are weapons too — mines, missiles, shields — but they remain secondary. At the higher speed classes the difficulty does not come from your rivals: it comes from the circuit itself, which you must know by heart to anticipate a corner you cannot yet see.
What built the series' reputation, beyond the handling, is the whole aesthetic package: a stripped-back industrial design inherited from The Designers Republic, and an electronic soundtrack that accompanies acceleration rather than commenting on it. Few racing games have so immediately recognisable an identity.
Progression is generous, with campaigns across several speed classes. Expect around fifteen hours to see most of it, and considerably more for the upper classes — the ones where the game truly becomes itself.