Speedway Heroes

Genre: Top-Down Motorbike Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Speedway Heroes is an Arcade-style Top-Down Motorbike Racing game released on mobile devices in 2020 as Speedway Heroes 2021, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. This game has players racing motorbikes in enclosed circuits.

The presentation in this game features an appealing colorful cartoony art style with simple but appealing 3D visuals from a Top-Down perspective. This is backed by energetic music that is catchy, but is so frequently interrupted by the short nature of the races that it just feels distracting more than anything.

The core gameplay here is extremely simple – you just hold A to accelerate, and can turn left and right, that’s it. Yet despite this simplicity, there’s still some nice nuance to the gameplay thanks to the way that the game emphasizes efficient turning – any time you turn, your speed is reduced, and the more you turn the slower you go, meaning that you’ll retain the most speed if you can make turns as quickly as possible. This gameplay is built on by letting players earn RPG-style upgrades to their vehicle that give players a goal to reach for beyond the current race’s finish line.

Unfortunately, while the game finds some nice nuance in its simple gameplay, the same cannot really be said for the game’s courses. There are a multitude of different courses to race here, but there might as well only be just a few, since all of this game’s courses are just boring circles and ovals. This lack of course variation severely limits this game in a really disappointing way.

However, even worse than this is that Speedway Heroes is riddled with the remnants of its mobile origins – lootboxes, wait mechanics, and “cards” you can get in those lootboxes that seem to have no meaning in this version of the game. There may not be microtransactions here, but all of the nasty side-effects of microtransactions are still present, forcing you to wait to access prizes you’ve unlocked, and with the cost of upgrades expanding exponentially in a way that really makes it seem like the game expected that you’d be paying real-world money for it rather than earning it.

Speedway Heroes is really frustrating for me because the presentation and core gameplay here is nicely compelling, but after playing for a short while without seeing any real variety to the tracks, and having to constantly deal with ticking countdown timers and other vestigial microtransaction annoyances, it becomes increasingly more difficult to enjoy the things this game does well. Besides, if you’re looking for good top-down Racing games, you have much better options on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Speedway Heroes is a Top-Down Motorbike Racing game with a cartoony look and simple controls that are both surprisingly appealing. Unfortunately, this game has a depressing lack of variety in its tracks, and the remnants of annoyances inserted into the game to push microtransactions in other versions still sap away the fun here.

Grade: C-

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