Speed Truck 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.)

Speed Truck Racing, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, is an Arcade-style Racing game that re-uses some of the art assets that were previously seen in the Daytona USA-esque Speedway Racing, but changes out the Nascar-like cars for trucks, and adds in sections of dirt track. The result is an experience that’s both very familiar yet different enough to be a truly separate game.

Much like its predecessor, Speed Truck Racing is an odd mix of surprisingly good, bad, and bizarre. On the one hand, the game’s 3D visuals feature some decent character models with a good amount of detail for both the cars and the courses, and there are even some nice lighting effects. On the other hand, the game’s framerates aren’t especially great. Add to this some really nasty aliasing. Then, just to keep things interesting, sprinkle in amusing sound-alike brand logos littering the cars and courses – companies like “Mechilin”, “Mibol” and “Subawy”, and no, I didn’t misspell those.

This game’s rock-inspired soundtrack isn’t quite as good as Speedway Racing, unfortunately, and the rest of the sounds you find here are okay but nothing extraordinary, for the most part. Of course, for better or worse, this game retains the prior games’ strange, cheesy announcer who says things like “kart your engines”.

Where Speedway Racing had issues with collision and aggressive AI, those problems seem to have been addressed here. Unfortunately, this game suffers from problems pertaining to its core physics. In third-person view mode, the direction your car is facing seems to have little to do with the direction it’s driving, and in first-person view modes, whenever you do a hard turn your car inexplicably bounces left and right. It doesn’t make any sense even in an arcadey version of racing, and it makes it very difficult to gauge turns. Are you over-correcting? Under-correcting? Just right? It seems like it’s often anyone’s guess.

Another holdover problem from Speedway Racing is the game’s overly-harsh “checkpoint” system that ends a race if you don’t pass its checkpoints with enough time remaining. While not quite as bad as what was in Speedway Racing, it’s still far too harsh

In the end, I definitely see some effort made to improve Speed Truck Racing over Speedway Racing, but the core gameplay is still unfortunately terribly broken. In 2021, there are enough good racing game choices on the Nintendo Switch that this game just isn’t worth it.

tl;dr – Speed Truck Racing is an Arcade-style Racing game that has players racing trucks on a strange combination of Nascar-style tracks and dirt-covered tracks. This game isn’t without its positive points, and it does make improvements over its predecessor, Speedway Racing, but the core gameplay here is still terribly broken, and this combined with the game’s aggressive checkpoint system sap all the fun out of the experience.

Grade: D+

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