I love old school racing games. Pole Position was one of my first games growing up, and Super Mario Kart is still one of my favorite games ever. I’m very picky about racing games though, so I went into Race Arcade with a bit of trepidation. The game immediately gave off a Micro Machines vibe from the pulled-out camera and tiny cars even though you’re not racing on pool tables or wild tracks, and there are sadly no power-ups or weapons in the game aside from the sides of your car. Rubbing is racing, after all!
Racing is simple enough: you can accelerate, brake, respawn yourself if you get too stuck (which luckily never happened to me) and steer left and right. The top-down camera means that people who aren’t great with their left and right may get confused, but because the controls are so simple there are multiple options for what part of the PS4 controller you use for throttle, brake, and steering. You can also set the camera to various distances from the car, but as you can see from my screenshot below using the nearest setting it’s still pulled back quite a bit.
This all worked out quite well aside from obstacles, shortcuts and the AI. Obstacles were incredibly frustrating; I found myself getting caught on them frequently, especially trees. If I could put bumpers up around all the courses I’d be a very happy man, since then I wouldn’t lose 5-10 seconds on the AI when I got hung up on something. This is made worse by AI that pretty much always runs like a long snake; unless you hit them or they bump each other getting into formation they’re always in a long, skinny line that’s very difficult to catch if you fall behind. This can be used to your advantage, as driving through their line scatters them and knocks them into one another, letting you slip through quickly. It would’ve been nice if some cars were “worse” at racing though, and would hit obstacles or make terrible turns on their own. Finally, some of the courses have places where you can just drive right through things like a shortcut, but these are illegal moves in the game and you’re forced to go back and drive on the actual course to continue. Sadly the game doesn’t tell you when you do this, so you don’t know you even need to go back until you get to the finish line and aren’t shown your lap time, then it’s up to you to go all the way back and figure out where you need to start from again.
Career mode is the real meat of the game, and it’s split into six categories based on the six types of vehicles you can drive: the standard rally car, a faster but harder to control formula car, the motorbike with great acceleration, the sports car that’s great for drifting, the tractor that’s like the proverbial turtle that slowly but steadily wins the race and the UFO that’s slow but floats above the course so it doesn’t have to worry about sliding or hitting most obstacles. The career of each vehicle has 3 “seasons” made up of five, ten, and fifteen races each that get progressively harder. Fifteen races may seem like a lot, but most of the races are over in just a couple minutes, and some are even less than one minute long! Like most racing games you’re given points based on how you placed in each race, and at the end of the season you’re (potentially) awarded money that you can use to buy other vehicles and unlock their careers.
You start with only the rally car, and the others require a fair amount of grinding to unlock unless you’re an expert at racing games. This was the issue I faced with Race Arcade: unless you’re in the top 6 (out of 10) when the season ends you won’t get any money at all, and even then 6th place gets very little. This made my introductory seasons brutal to play as I had a hard time ever doing well and would end up making no progress. My eyes were locked on that UFO but it’s so expensive it felt like I’d never earn enough to get it (note: I never did).
Luckily there’s also the local multiplayer mode where you can play races made up of up to six total racers (human or AI), and here you can use any vehicle you want without unlocking them. Unlike career mode, races can be made up of all kinds of vehicles, and I loved seeing just how well my UFO handled sharp curves against the more typical vehicles. Sadly this mode doesn’t award any money, but it’s a great place to practice as you can select any courses you want out of the 100 included in the game!
The game also includes single race mode (which does pay out, but at incredibly low amounts) and a time trial mode (which allows you to play a course over and over with a ghost of your best time on the track along with you). These modes are good little diversions, but the game as a whole just never fully got me invested. It’s nice that the tracks are all quick, and at one point I even took first place in a medium difficulty career, which felt fantastic, but I needed more depth in the game. At an MSRP of $10 (at least on PS4), it’s not a bad price for a quick little racing game if you love the genre.
Race Arcade is available on PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One and Steam (Windows, Mac, Linux).
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.