Race

The Battlezone series' race gamemode is characterized by players competing to be the first to complete a pre-defined course, using their weapons to hinder the progress of other players. It appeared officially in Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs and Battlezone II, but made a de facto appearance as an implicit gamemode in Battlezone.

Battlezone

The deathmatch map Mars Rally forces players to navigate a series of narrow canyons designed to imitate an obstacle course before they can reach the main deathmatch arena. Combat in the canyons is cramped and awkward, and powerups are sparse; indeed, weapon powerups are only provided in the arena itself. Whilst the maps's design helps to push players to follow the canyons, overall gameplay remains the same as on any other deathmatch map.

Battlezone: Battlegrounds later introduced four new maps designed for use as racetracks: the first, Achilles 500, featured both a grid-format starting line and an improvised pit lane; Q4raceTZ was designed with one smaller track in each corner for informal use; the third, Volcanos, feataured a large track at the circumference of a deathmatch arena; while the last, Z Rave Race!, was set up with both starting and finishing lines and even gave instructions on how best to run the race

Maps

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Mars Rally

Maps (Battlegrounds)

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Achilles 500

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Q4RaceTZ

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Volcanos

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Z Rave Race!

Rise of the Black Dogs

The race mode in Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs is much simpler than its prior implementation in Battlezone II and supports between two and four players. After selecting the number of laps they wish to race (between 1 and 20, default 5), each player is prompted to choose one from a list of eleven vehicles (scouts, tanks, rocket tanks, bombers, walkers and the Bobcat) and four maps. After spawning at the start point, each player has a single NAV camera highlighted on their HUD and must drive towards it. After getting within two meters of each camera, the next is highlighted. The first player to complete the specified number of laps wins the game.

Players are rendered unable to hop out of their vehicle during a race match, and if a player's vehicle is destroyed - be it by another player or an environmental hazard - then they are sent back to the last NAV beacon they passed. The game ends when the first player reaches the finish, with the order of the other players in the table being decided by which NAV point they are currently driving towards and, should two players be headed for the same NAV beacon, how far they are from their target.

Maps

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Moon

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Io

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Venus

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Europa

Battlezone II

The 1.2 Patch for Battlezone II, released just over five months after Rise of the Black Dogs, marked the first implementation of the race gamemode to the PC games, though in this implementation it is much more similar to deathmatch. Players are required to pass between highlighted checkpoints to complete a lap, with the leader gaining a point for each checkpoint they reach. Kills provide a five-point bonus to the killer and subtract a point from the victim's score.

The race mode never gathered much attention as its games usually suffered severe warp or devolved into deathmatch. As the fastest vehicle in the game it became commonplace for players to choose the Jackal, but poor network connections combined with the Jackal's speed caused warp would make the positions of other players difficult to follow and the race simply a matter of navigating the map fastest. In games where the Jackal was not chosen play would instead devolve to deathmatch, as points could be gained more quickly by killing other players than by driving the track.

The race gamemode was broken by the 1.3 Patch at some point after Public Beta 1; the map would work for the host alone but the checkpoint code would break when a client joined. The race map was removed in Public Beta 5.1 until the gamemode was completely redesigned by Nielk1 and a re-implemented in Public Beta 6.1.

Trivia

• Before the gamemode's redesign, Race: Pluto (the only official Race map) had to be circumnavigated four times to count as a single lap, as it contained sixteen checkpoints in groups of four.

Maps

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Race: Pluto - Get from checkpoint to checkpoint, blowing up anyone who's competing. On this map, a lap is 4 checkpoints. Powerups are in the longer routes.