Trax – Build It Race It

Genre: Slot Car Racing

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Trax is a Slot Car Racing game released on Nintendo Switch in 2018 and ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2019. As the title implies, this game’s big selling point is the ability to design your own courses to race on, in addition to those included with the game.

This game features unimpressive 3D visuals, with all of this game’s tracks apparently taking place in only one background, a child’s bedroom. The game features no music, and the only noteworthy sounds are an annoying noise for the cars and the skittering sound of cars leaving the track. Not great.

The gameplay here is simple, as you would expect from Slot Car Racing – just hold a button to go, or… well, or don’t do that. Unfortunately, this game manages to screw up even that simple formula by failing to give any sort of decent indication when your car will go off the track. You would think that the track builder might be this game’s saving grace, but it’s sadly extremely limited, giving players less than a dozen different pieces to use.

There’s just not much going to Trax, it fails in just about every area. It’s ugly, the sound isn’t very good, the gameplay is simple and doesn’t even handle that simplicity well, and the track builder that the game seeks to build its name on is far too limited to be of interest. This is about as bad as racing games get without being outright broken in some way.

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tl;dr – Trax is a Slot Car Racing game that fails in just about every way – the presentation is terrible, the gameplay can’t even manage to get Slot Car Racing’s one-button simplicity right, and the track builder is extremely limited. Don’t waste your time and money on this mess.

Grade: D

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