Recent reviews by batt

A very promising glimpse into the first ~15ish hours of the campaign. If you like the old Tokyo Xtreme Racer games, you'll like this one too.

If you're apprehensive about paying $30 for an early access title, don't feel bad about waiting. This game is a little rough around the edges, mainly in regards to AI behavior and menu navigation, but there is lots of potential here.

Wasn't improved at all from the demo. Still has all of the unplayably bad stuttering and hitching.

So far, an extremely charming arcade game with lots of things that will put a smile on your face, regardless of if you're a diehard rally fan or not.

First impressions are great- this game is SHOCKINGLY polished, for an initial early-access release from an indie developer. There are lots of creative ideas that feel right out of the time period it's trying to represent; not only the graphics, but the UI design, the stages, and the way the cars are modeled all feel extremely faithful (the handling too, but I will get into that later.) I especially liked how the "Car Collection" screen was themed- I was grinning ear to ear as soon as I opened it.

I was very pleased to see how the developers had a focus on Steam Deck support at launch. I can confirm that the game worked right out of the box with no fiddling on my Deck. Great experience - the game is well-suited to this form factor.

The game is very focused on being a good pick-up-and-play experience, and does it well, which is a thing many racing games have been lacking in lately. You don't need to go fiddling around with car setups and tire compounds in order to be competitive in certain stages, just hop in, don't crash, and beat the time to advance. No BS. Tons of other games to play if you want that experience.

The main pain point in this game has to be the stages. While aesthetically, they do a great job of being distinct from one another, the layout of the roads need work. A few examples being:
-In Australia, Kenya and Sweden, there are too many random and abrupt 90-degree turns, chicanes, and hairpins in the middle of otherwise flat and open ground. These would be fine if there were props there to suggest these turns being intentional, but the roads wiggling around like that just looks weird and out of place. The other stages like Greece and Japan suit these turns well, as the scenery suggests a reason for them being there. If you need to increase the difficulty in those areas, maybe use blocked-off intersections instead?
-Finland is way too flat and boring. Real-life Finnish rally stages are the most exciting ones, filled with tons of hills and gradual elevation changes, with lots of fun jumps and dips. If you've ever played on Finnish rally stages in other games, you'll know.
-Kenya is too easy IMO. From what I've seen, Kenyan rally stages are pretty brutal and unforgiving. Needs bumpier, more narrow roads perhaps?

The physics are a difficult thing to discuss. One one hand, the game is themed around being a retro rally title, and the simplicity and jank feels extremely faithful the time period. On the other hand, comparing the driving experience to other rally titles in the same arcade-rally genre, namely the classic DiRT titles and Art of Rally, it feels a little lacking. It's as if you tried to bridge the gap between the physics of Sega Rally Championship and Colin McRae DiRT 2.

As with any rally-focused game, and due to the inherent difficulty of rally as a racing discipline, the physics take a while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it you'll start to see where the driving model falls flat, even after fiddling with the sensitivity settings. Chucking cars around winding roads feels great until you get to low-speed cornering, where it starts to fall apart. Cars don't dig into a line of grip, they sort of "pivot" around their own axis until the "drifting" part kicks in. This isn't inherently wrong, and it's how DiRT's physics fundamentally work. However, when that drifting part kicks in, the cars carry a TON of speed right at the edge of grip, then instantly slow down to a crawl after you rotate the car too far. It's especially apparent in anything with AWD. The momentum and weight-iness of the cars feel good enough, until they reach that point of the drift. While this phenomena could be argued as a quirk of the game, and part of the "jank" to master in order to git gud (which I'm happy to agree with,) it's part of a bigger problem where the physics don't have a set "goal" in mind. It's an arcade game at heart, but it tries to bridge the gap between grip and drift physics in a strange way. I just feel like there's a better way to solve it. Pulling off long, sustained drifts feels amazing in other games of the same genre, but it's kind of frustrating in this game.

The sounds are meh. This is probably a byproduct of being early in development, but they leave a lot to be desired. A lot of cars sound exactly alike and sometimes the engine sounds are way too repetitive and droning. With some tweaking I can see them shining a lot better.

Some more nitpicks I have that don't need an essay to explain:

- In the third-person cameras, the origin of the spring-arm camera moves way too much. It makes it considerably harder to tell what the car is doing. Don't remove it, just tone it down a bit.

- Pacenotes, for the most part, are okay. However, some of them are completely wrong or misleading, and the lack of any "slowing" callout at the end of long straight sections can kill your run sometimes. Needs a lot more testing.

- Some stages could use some more buildings closer to the track to break up the scenery, especially Japan and Finland.

- In the "Achievements" menu, you have to scroll all the way down to select the 'Back' button to exit, instead of being able to just press the back button on the controller.

- On the "Car Repair" screen, having to manually select the -/+ buttons on the UI is annoying. I would prefer if it was just bound to left/right on the Dpad, or LB/RB.

- It would be nice if I could pause during the countdown phase when the rally starts. Is there a reason for it being disabled?

- The CRT filter is not good. It makes the game way lower resolution that it needs to be, like if you took a picture of an interlaced signal on a real CRT where you can only see half the lines. I don't know if it's based on a percentage of the screen size, but on the Deck's 800p it's just bad. Needs some kind of logarithmic curve instead, or just standardize the internal resolution down to 480p.

- The collision on some of the trees is weirdly disjointed. There's one tree on the Australia stage on the inside of a hairpin in the forest section where the collision hull extends out way too far into the corner.

Overall, this game leaves an extremely good first impression, and I'm excited to see how it progresses throughout early access. There's lots of potential to become a staple of pick-up-and-play arcade racers if the devs really want to strive for it.