Doritos: Dash of Destruction

"My grandpa said to me once, 'son, it doesn't matter if the horse is blind. Just hook him to the wagon anyway.' I really don't know what he meant by that."

Doritos: Dash of Destruction is a downloadable psuedo-homebrew game, now available on the Xbox Live Arcade. As the title might suggest, the game's apparent purpose is to advertise Doritos.

The game was conceived by medical software programmer Mike Borland in his spare time. Borland appears throughout the game, popping up in between missions to offer a tidbit of irrelevant wisdom (see above) or to upgrade your T Rex or Doritos Truck respectively. The Live Arcade version of the game was developed by the studio NinjaBee. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Advertisement games have been tried on the Live Arcade before, and have never been anything to get excited about. Toyota's Yaris, one of the worst games I've ever played, ever, in my entire life, for all eternity, was released on the Live Arcade for free, and tasked players with driving the titular compact around on roller-coaster highways, shooting robots and small animals with a scorpion tail-like appendage attached to the back of the car. I'm serious. The controls were horrendous and the graphics optically painful.

Dash of Destruction's premise is no more logical. The game is divided into two parts; a Truck Campaign and a T Rex campaign. The T Rex campaign puts you in control of, well, a T Rex, and your objectives include running around (and destroying) cities and eating Doritos delivery trucks ("Because T Rexs like to eat Doritos. Seriously"). Later levels up the challenge by introducing a rival dinosaur for you to compete against.

The truck levels play out the same way, but place you in the role of the delivery driver as opposed to the rampaging dinosaur. You score points by making "deliveries", which basically involves driving into a giant, holographic Dorito before you get eaten too many times.

I played the game for all of twenty minutes, and beat not only both campaigns, but had also earned 190 of the 200 available gamerscore. most of the achievements are awarded for completing campaign objectives, with the only exception being 10GS for winning a multiplayer game.

As I mentioned before, Borland pops up between levels and upgrades your T Rex with cybernetic enhancements, like robotic legs and a nose-blade for cutting through buildings. He also upgrades your Doritos truck with things like nitros tanks and a snow-plow looking deal. By the time I finished the last level my truck looked like a cross between Christopher Nolan's Batmobile and a steam locomotive. The T Rex looked like some horrible experiment gone wrong ("It's not as nature intended, it's better!").

The gameplay is fun, frantic, and ridiculous. The environments are fully destructible, which makes playing as the T Rex a lot of fun. The truck levels aren't as interesting, but are more challenging.

Overall Doritos: Dash of Destruction is a fun, albeit short game, which will more than likely leave you satisfied. You also can't beat the price - it's free. And in the time it took you to read this review, you could have earned about 50GS.