WildTrax Racing

Genre: Arcade Racing

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

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Power Racing Bundle, along with Speedway Racing. It is also included in Power Racing Bundle 2, along with Speed Truck Racing.)

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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