Backlog Beatdown: Destroying Cars with Destruction Derby 2

There were no shortage of racing games on the PS1, and Destruction Derby 2 was one of the ones that everybody had played at some point. It must have been something of a bold venture at the time, as racing games that had destructible cars as their main gameplay mechanic were almost unheard of. Yes, there were games where the cars could take damage, but not necessarily games where that was the whole point of the game!

Destruction Derby 2 is a racing game which follows a pretty straight formula of drive around a track and attempt to reach first place. If this was all there were to it, the game wouldn’t be much good. The graphics are OK for the time but the limited draw distance results in a lot of ‘pop-in’ on certain tracks. There is limited commentary that gets old quite quickly, and this game was released before analogue controls were standardised so it’s not that easy to control your cars effectively.

What sets this apart from the other racing games of the time is that it’s less about your race position and more about how many points you can get by causing your opponents to spin. If you collide with your opponent and cause them to spin 90 degrees, you get ten points. If you cause them to spin one 180 degrees, or force them to retire from the race, you get 25 points, and if you manage to get them to spin all the way around you get 50. Your points and those of your 19 opponents are totalled up at the end of the race – along with 50, 25 and 10 points available for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd positions respectively – and the driver with the most points is the winner. The Championship mode involves four seasons of four races plus a ‘Destruction Derby’ mode at the end of each race where the cars all drive at each other in a coliseum-like setting and see who lasts the longest, and the idea is to get promoted to the top division and win the Championship.

Definitely the car to choose if you want to win...

It was a good idea, but it wasn’t terribly well-executed. Scoring points for the race by crashing in to other cars was fun when it worked, but more often than not it didn’t; sometimes the car wouldn’t spin, sometimes I’d clip straight through the car altogether. And let’s not pretend that the few times I did manage it weren’t more by luck than by judgement. The Destruction Derby levels were a lottery based on how many cars had already been knocked out of the race by the time you get a chance to score. And because you have to be hitting the cars at a certain speed to get them to spin at all, the only car to choose out of the three that are available is the Pro car – maximum speed, minimum control. The only reason I made it through the third season is that I was fortunate enough to score something like 400 points on the first race; to this day I still don’t know how I managed that.

I did eventually manage to beat the game but with such an inconsistent scoring method, the only way I could do it was to scum-save the game between each race when I got a relatively decent score. Somehow I’m taking up 5 blocks on the memory card with a one-block game!

There was a “Stock Car Racing” mode – a mode where the score is based on your position and nothing else – but I didn’t bother with that. Destruction Derby 2 doesn’t handle well enough to get much fun out of it as a racing simulation, and there are far better games out there for the purpose.

I probably sound quite negative about this game but the truth is that I did enjoy my experience with it. I learned little tricks and quirks of each track to help my progress, which gave me a sense of achievement. Actually making it to the finish line was always nice, and never a guarantee. And props to the soundtrack of grind-y Nu-Metal, which was very much of-it’s-time and leaves me in a nostalgic haze.