Recent reviews by Dragon Ex Machina ΘΔ&

It's fine. It looks nice, it runs well, the cars are not miserable to control. There just isn't much depth to it, and I couldn't find any online lobbies, so what you see is very much what you get. There's a cast of characters you can select as your driver, and all of them are colorful cardboard. The brief paragraph description they get is the entirety of their character, nothing particularly interesting happens to any of them in their grand prix cinematics, and there's no driver interaction during races; you'll only ever hear your own driver, and they rarely have anything interesting to say. Toshiro drops a "cake is a lie" joke, and the only reason that doesn't make this review a thumbs down is that the bar is so low for arcade racers that I have to acknowledge the game's overall competency.

Don't pay $20 USD for it, but if all you want to do is drift some low poly cars around some mildly challenging courses, you can probably do worse.

I jumped out of the plane as fast as possible and killed someone before the game's tutorial was finished explaining how to shoot my gun. This accomplished a weekly challenge goal to get a kill within 10 seconds of landing. For this feat I was awarded with the ability to dab on command.

It's fun. Go dumb and frag out. Do the winner dance. Your loot is ephemeral, but the fun you have will stay with you.

Ok, first thing, front and center: This is a mobile game. If you're expecting an arcade racer in the vein of something like RedOut or F-Zero, this is incredibly not it. It's more like Asphalt, but with no MTX (that I saw...). I'm not a fan of racing games designed for mobile platforms, so that's my bias. If it IS an asphalt-like mobile racer you're after, maybe you'll give this more of a shot than I did.

The only gameplay mode is a Tournament mode, which drops you straight into a race series - no time trials or single races with track selections. Runs smooth on my 5 year old machine with no technical issues to speak of. Controls are simple and quickly conveyed in the middle of the action; if you're familiar with contemporary racing games, the steering and accelerator are where you expect them to be on a gamepad. Left trigger + stick input engages a drift, X uses warp crystals you pick up along the track to boost, and A warps you into a contextual target; either a point on the track, taking you to a different route, or into an opponent, wiping them out. Cool concept, but that's all there is to the mechanical racing. Your performance is entirely dependent on how efficiently you can warp (boost); the machines are effortless to control, so you're just kind of looking to hit as many warp pads and crystals as possible.

There's a kind of randomized gear aspect where, between races, you're offered a small selection of parts and upgrades to purchase with earned Credits that dramatically change the look of your machine in addition to making it go a little better. The offerings randomize and restock after a given number of races. Aesthetic is the game's strong point by a country mile, so this is cool on a surface level, but what's the point of going about it the way it does? It feels like a model that was designed to sell re-rolls* and keep you playing until the next restock, not give you goals to work towards.

Maybe there is an audience for this that I'm just not a part of - Asphalt seems like it's successful enough, so this sort of racer has a place somewhere. But for someone like me who's looking for a mechanically gripping arcade racing experience, Warp Drive doesn't even make it off the starting line.

*edit: reiterating that the game presented me with no microtransactions in my brief time with it, and there's no evidence of "limited play" mechanics like "fuel" or "stamina" that I saw; it just FEELS and CONTROLS like a mobile game, it isn't monetized like one

There's a lot of comparisons to Overwatch, but these are mostly tied to character design - tanky knight with barrier shield, stocky hero with hook-grab skill, short lava-themed turret builder, etc. As far as the mechanics go, there's plenty that's different from Overlook; a mildly MOBA-esque item buying system and card-based buff loadouts, for instance.

You can definitely feel the beta in some places. The majority of VGS voice lines use a placeholder voice, and a lot of the cards are using temporary art. For a free game, though, Paladins is very promising, and relatively acceptable as far as "Free2Play, Pay2Win" content goes. Hero cards are decently affordable, and ranking them up doesn't require further purchases or RNG.

I'd keep an eye on this; an Overwatch killer it is not, but if Hi-Rez can swerve away from horrible Pay2Win territory, they might have something good going on here.