WipEout 2048

WipEout 2048 is the final installment of the legendary anti-gravity racing series, and also one of the best games the PlayStation Vita received right at the start of its life. Time-wise it goes back to the very beginning of the league, back when racing still happened directly through city streets between buildings — so the tracks feature concrete walls, ramps, and highway overpasses instead of the later, purely futuristic circuits. The campaign is arranged into three seasons by year and offers classic races, time trials, zone battles, and elimination runs where weapons are the whole point. Progression isn't strictly linear, either: every race offers several different objectives at once, and the player chooses which ones to pursue, so it's possible to move forward even without a perfect finish.

The controls remain brutally demanding on precision: the player has to master airbrakes for tight corners, manage energy that serves as both health and turbo fuel, and know when to use a weapon and when to scrap it for energy instead. Ships are divided by focus into speed, agility, and endurance types, and further split into performance classes, which changes track behavior far more fundamentally than it might first appear. Studio Liverpool also added the ability to race against PlayStation 3 owners on the same tracks, an unusual luxury at the time. Technically it's a showy display of the hardware — the game runs smoothly, sharply, with excellent reflections on the ships' bodies, and the series' clean typographic design still looks good years later.

Music is just as important here as the racing. The soundtrack leans on electronic acts and club rhythms, and together with engine noise and race-tower announcements it creates a feeling that has no equivalent elsewhere in the genre. Reviews at the time ranked it among the console's best titles, with the reservation of long loading times in early versions. Studio Liverpool was closed shortly after release, so 2048 ended up being its farewell — and, at the same time, the end of one of PlayStation's most important series. Today it's among the few games worth pulling the Vita out of the drawer for.