My thoughts about the game

[Sylvine]

I've not finished the game, I've hit some kind of glass ceiling on the third "campaign" (the black guy with the purple car, can't remember the name of either) on hard mode, it's just too difficult for me. I will keep playing it, but really it seems I will never beat the rest of the game, no matter how hard I try.

But that's not what I want to talk about, I'm fine with the game being hard, it's not really a review either, more like a dump of random thoughts.

So first thing, I think having this BS sci-fi explanation about the magical phase drift engine, or whatever it's called a mistake.
This is obviously just a game trying to mimic the aestheticist of cars in cartoon, Initial D being a clear reference, so it should just be a game about normal car doing crazy ♥♥♥♥ just because, there is no need for some boring explanation.

While I'm talking about non-gameplay related stuff, the story and narration is awful, but almost to the point of being fun. I said almost because it quickly become repetitive, with the same scene repeating over and over ("I just want to do that, but you are forcing me to do this... Oh now I understand why you made me do these things I didn't liked).
It should have been a classical rivalry-street game kind of story, that would have been as stupid but more entertaining at least.

I did like when characters where giving actual driving advice, but it would have been waaaay better (and harder to develop) if they could have given this during the races, at the right moment. ("for this turn, you should do this and that")
And not by text of course. And yes, I know dubbing a game is expensive, and completely unfordable for indy if you add localisation to the mix, but really having written dialogue during a race should obviously be a big no.

I also liked the idea of a multi-character story reminiscent of a fighting game (more on that latter), but the execution is really flawed.

And this is a nice segway to my first comment on gameplay : there is clearly a variety problem, and this is mostly due to this weird choice of not having collision.
The campaign consists of doing the exact same race 3 times in a row, but sometimes you don't have a point of reference to judge how fast you go, and that's the ONLY difference between each mode (drift put aside).
Frankly if you want to do a game focused on time attack, fine, but don't pretend otherwise with this BS race mode, and above all give us some proper tools, like intermediate timers and ♥♥♥♥, so you don't have to do a full 4 minutes lap before knowing your time was trash.
But really having a real racing mode with collisions should be a no brainer, it would add a ton of variety for cheap. That was so sad when I was still not used to that, I was watching my rival closing in on my rear mirror, trying to position my car to block him, everything was super intense and... oh yeah, he can just drive through me, so exciting...

But I do like the idea of perfecting a track before going to the next one, I think it's better than just flirting around tracks randomly like most games do.

But still using my fighting game analogy, it would have been cool to have a training mode where you could train some specific corner (maybe using a rewind function, but only on training mode).

And speaking about the tracks, they are pretty bland from a visual standpoint.
There are some nice part here and there, but also long stretches of nothing interesting, not only it's a bit boring, but it also doesn't help to learn the tracks.
I do like this feeling of loneliness, like you are driving when everybody else is sleeping, but a bit of life here and there could help (after like 30 races on the city level, I noticed you can see some trucks on some other lane, but it's almost subliminal).

And now to the driving, after all this time, I'm still not completely convince by this dual stick thing.
So sure, it's pretty unique, but at the same time it removes a lot of what make driving games enjoyable.
For me the pleasure of driving fast is this feeling of always being at the edge of controlling a huge chunk of metal.
Here you never really lose control, and you never feel the weight of the car.
I think it could be improved a bit while keeping the dual stick controls, by improving collisions and working on the "game feel". (yes, it's super vague)

To be more positive, I like that each car felt super different, like a fighting game character that needs to be learned and mastered, it's really satisfying when it finally "clicks".
But I think it could be pushed more by adding something like a boost meter that fills up in different ways. For example a drifting car would fill the boost by drifting close to walls, while a fast car would need to reach top speed. Of course you're going to run out of ideas pretty quickly, but you can divide all cars into like 4 or 5 category, each having a different boost method.
And you could have races with or without boost to squeeze a bit of variety.


One last random thing, the speedometer is really distracting, for some reason it always looks like I'm having a Steam notification.