There’s a rumor going around that Off-World Interceptor started as a serious attempt at making a science fiction game and due to how laughable the cut scenes turned out Crystal Dynamics reconfigured it into a parody. Whatever the case, they left us with a serviceable vehicular combat game.

The above magazine page is from EGM, clearly showing Off-World Interceptor (then called Off Road Interceptor) running on the 32X. So, it’s obvious that the game was in development for quite a while and could have potentially ended up a Sega exclusive. Luckily, we got it on 3DO.
In Off-World Interceptor you play a “Trashman” tasked with cleaning up planets of villainous intergalactic scum. It’s cheesy and silly and plays out hilariously in cutscenes parodied MST3K (Google it) style.

You’re given several modes to choose from, which is nice. You start off with one car and as you earn money from scoring kills and collecting money you can upgrade your car, buy a new one or buy powerup items to help you in battle.
Despite driving forward the entire time and having little control of your car you do have a lot of options when it comes down to actually tackling levels and there are tangible benefits to attempting areas multiple times to try to figure out what the best route through is. Sometimes one will swarm you with enemies, while another might be littered with money and precious repair items. Off-Road Interceptor is more than a rail shooter, but at the same time you can’t help but want more control over your car.

Combat is generally pretty satisfying and the screen will often fill up with ridiculous amounts of enemies. This can sometimes make the game artificially difficult and force you to restart multiple times until you have the patterns of enemies memorised. Even once you’ve memorised where enemies will turn up sometimes your shots wont connect or enemies will get stuck behind you and kill you from behind giving you no way to fight back. I don’t want to make it sound like Off-World Interceptor is designed badly, it’s just full of silly little design mistakes and a difficulty curve that can only be described as vertical. The fundamental foundation of the gameplay is solid, but it’s very frustrating and you need a lot of patience to persevere.

I really like the way Off-World Interceptor looks. Crystal Dynamics went to great pains to make each location look different, and although the game re-skins enemies a lot at least there is sufficient variation in theme to make it possible to overlook this. The frame rate is generally very good, however this is tempered by the low draw distance that may frustrate some people. You had a better draw distance in Shockwave, and to me Shockwave is a far more sophisticated game.

I would recommend Off-World Interceptor to you, but tentatively. It’s not a badly designed game, but the poor difficulty scaling and bad enemy balance might put you off. If you persevere through the erroneous design missteps you do find a fundamentally solid game with some neat customization options, good variety in vehicle choices, great level design and slick graphics.