WildTrax Racing

Genre: Arcade Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in multiple bundles. For more information, check out the Nintendo Switch Compilations/Bundle Charts Page.)

WildTrax Racing, released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, is an Arcade-style Racing game that has players driving one of various 4×4 vehicles on one of three off-road courses.

The presentation here isn’t great, and it’s occasionally bizarre. The game’s courses are fairly uninteresting, the vehicles are decent-looking but nothing special, and while there are moments with some good lighting, for the most part everything looks pretty bland. However, things get even worse in split-screen 4-player mode, where the framerates can drop to a slide-show, the resolution drops along with it, aliasing makes every surface look jagged, and some nasty pop-in not only makes the game ugly, but actually hinders the gameplay due to obstacles appearing in the not-far-off distance. In addition to this, vehicles and courses are littered with sound-alike brand logos for companies like “Mechilin”, “Mibol” and “Subawy”, and no, I didn’t misspell those.

For the sound, this game’s music offers some bland and forgettable rock-inspired music, car noises that sound like they come from an RC car rather than a massive 4×4, a fact exacerbated by the strange high-pitched whine that your turbo boost emits. This underwhelming audio presentation is capped off by a strange, cheesy announcer, who says things like “kart your engines”.

For the racing itself, this game has some unexceptional off-road racing dominated by a lot of out-of-control off-the-ground moments. Players are technically “racing” against 49 other vehicles (except in multiplayer), but it feels more like a caravan than a race – every other vehicle has a head-start but is traveling extra-slow, so you’re not racing them so much as overtaking them one by one. If you’re racing against anything, it’s the checkpoint clock, constantly ticking down and signaling a game over message if it reaches zero before you can hit a checkpoint.

This would be sub-par already, but this game is dragged down by a horrible lack of content – as I mentioned, there are only three courses, which just isn’t much variety to work with. If you’re even halfway decent, at racing games, you’ll see everything this game has to offer within a half hour or so, and as the multiplayer is so horribly crippled, there isn’t much reason to come back to the game after that.

WildTrax Racing isn’t a horrible Racing game, but it’s a game steeped in mediocrity, plagued by some pretty severe problems, and then starved by a lack of worthwhile content. The single-player gameplay isn’t lengthy enough or compelling enough to make this game worthwhile, and the multiplayer gameplay is so broken that it’s not worth subjecting friends to. As a result, it’s hard to see any reason you’d want to play this game.

tl;dr – WildTrax Racing is an Arcade Racing game where players take 4×4 vehicles out on off-road courses. Unfortunately, the game has a serious lack of content, the single-player gameplay isn’t very compelling, and the multiplayer mode is crippled by horrendous graphical issues. I struggle to see any reason to play this game at all.

Grade: D

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