It’s a little too easy to wrap up this preview by dubbing Blur an amalgamation of Project Gotham Racing with the power-ups and destruction level akin to a crazy Mario Kart game. No really, it is. Upon connecting online with the current multi-player beta, you’re thrust into 10 or 20-man (if you’re lucky to find people to play at this time) races of vehicular mayhem.

Unlike your average racer that tries to be as realistic as possible with the physics, tracks and car models, Blur introduces power-ups at your disposal you can collect on the track just like Mario Kart; they range from the standard green-colored Nitro boost to the Blue Shell equivalent Red Shunt. Best of all, you can store up to three different power-ups during a race and switch between them to suit your needs. Your car does have a health bar, which can be repaired by taking the yellow Repair power-up, failing which, you will be deducted 3-seconds off your time as your car is knocked off the track.

Instead of doing mad powerslides like a kart game, you still have to adhere to the law of real-life driving physics or an approximation of. You’ll be rapidly tapping the accelerate button and even soft-press the e-brake when taking turns, and you can swerve left or right to dodge oncoming projectiles from the back. Heck, you can even use certain power-ups to stop oncoming projectiles if you time your attacks just right. It’s simple to get into, incredibly addictive, and is as arcade-like as it can get.

It also helps that the graphics are stylized and flashy. The countdown timer before a race starts meshes together with the background with your oncoming car at the center, while the finish line tag is made up of a bunch of transparent words on the road that states which lap you are currently at. As far as aesthetics go, it’s something different in the genre.

In Blur, there is a leveling system based on experience – which is depicted as an accumulation of “fans”. As you gain more fans by either doing stunts during races, wrecking someone using the power-ups on the field, or just finishing the race, you get to unlock different cars for different race categories, and special mods which can be customized to give you innate boosts to make your car slightly different from other people. Said mods can range from giving you a random power-up at the start of each race, to additional fans whenever you successfully knock someone out with a power-up.

For the beta, we were capped at about Rank 15, but the full game is said to go up to Rank 40 with an additional 10 epic ranks. The furthest we’ve unlocked so far is a Land Rover that’s built tough, but has a top speed akin to a Kenari. Anyone not familiar with the physics of an arcade racer should stick to using the Volkswagen Scirocco (the default car you start with). In fact, for most car classes, we found that you could do just as well with the default car than the new unlocks, at least for the beta.

Currently, lag is persistent from where we’re playing. Even though we seem to be catching up, the fact that we’re competing with people outside the South-East Asian region means that current online racers will always be one step ahead of us. I know that I’m still not used to the aforementioned combination, but lag did play a big part. Let’s hope Bizarre Creations and Activision fix the problem before the game’s release, as multi-player is the big thing Blur is pushing. It’ll be such a shame that such a simple-yet-super-addictive racer gets bogged down by such trivialities.