Recent reviews by specarmi

• Overall: 8 / 10
• Graphics: 10 - It perfectly sells the scale and feel of tiny toy cars driving on a plastic track.
• Sound: 7 - Quality sound effects and a good soundtrack (especially the funky menu music).
• Gameplay: 8 - The driving is unrelentingly physics based -- if you boost on a slight slope you might fly off the track -- and this is initially annoying but ultimately rewarding. It’s a winning recipe of simple controls and a high skill ceiling. The driving alone is a 10/10 but the surrounding elements are mixed. The tracks are well designed but eventually repetitive (although this issue is mitigated by the community built tracks). Some of the time trials are frustratingly difficult, until you realize you're meant to find shortcuts, which becomes a fun game in itself. The worst issue is that the game offers a huge variety of cars, but only a few race/sports cars are competitively viable. Most of the interesting looking cars are worse by every metric and topple over easily.
• Style: 6 - The style of the game is a little too straightforward, and the environments surrounding the tracks are uninspired.
• Difficulty: 5 - The game's physics is punishing enough to require some mastery but after getting the hang of it most races and time trials are easy to beat (at least on medium difficulty).
• Length: 8 - The single player mode overstays its welcome a bit, with the final tracks being repeats, but I wasn't bored by the time I finished.
• Completion Notes: I reached 100% completion in the single player mode on medium difficulty, tried several online races, and customized a vehicle.
• Summary: Incredibly satisfying driving physics and perfect graphics let down somewhat by limited variation.

Side note: I've read complaints about the monetization and lootboxes in this game and I'm not seeing the issue here. I felt like I had a full experience and didn't feel a big push to buy more content. The lootboxes are a poor mechanism (other rewards would have been more motivating), but in my experience they were exclusively earned through playing.

This is one of few games I have bounced off of really quickly. I found the control scheme to be unbearable. Moving and releasing the joystick is a really unintuitive method for jumping that also seemed to hurt my thumb after a bit. Once it became clear I’d have to do that constantly in the game and there’s no way to remap it I decided to move on.

This is the only steam game I own that will not launch on my laptop. This is an issue the developers have known about for years and have not fixed. I can't recommend buying a game that might be broken on your system.

This problem may also be more widespread than it appears because you can't write a review if the game won't launch and you have no playtime. Fortunately, I was able to get the game running on a different PC, but it is still broken on my laptop.