Speedway 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.)

Speedway Racing, released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, is an Arcade-style Racing game that seeks to imitate the sort of high-speed experience you’d get in a NASCAR-style race, with some inspiration from games like Daytona USA thrown in for good measure.

In terms of presentation, Speedway 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 really nice lighting and shadow effects. On the other hand, the game’s framerates in every mode except the single-racer time trial mode are absolutely atrocious. In both the 20-car standard races in single-player and 4-player split-screen, these framerates start out low to begin with, and become even choppier during collisions, which are extremely common. 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 mix of good, bad, and strange extends to the sound. Speedway Racing has a surprisingly excellent rock-inspired soundtrack that fits this game’s look and feel perfectly. Sorry, I can’t seem to find songs online to link to or I would. On the other hand, car sounds are just “okay” at best, collision noises are completely unconvincing, and tire screeching noises when braking seem off as well. Then there’s the presence of the strange, cheesy announcer, who says things like “kart your engines”.

Taking it all in, I didn’t dislike this game’s presentation, but definitely came away from it with an odd feeling that I was both impressed and underwhelmed.

Unfortunately, things are a bit less positive when it comes to the gameplay. Firstly, it bears mention that the car AIs in this game are oddly aggressive, both with you and amongst each other. Because of this, you will see a lot of collisions. In fact, you’ll scarcely have a single lap in the game’s mostly oval-shaped courses without seeing at least one crash, and at times even a multi-car pile-up.

This leads to one of the game’s other issues – the physics here make absolutely no sense. The moment one car collides with another or scrapes against a wall, it seems like any number of random things can happen. Your vehicle could get flung one way or another, could get trapped against the other vehicle, or could maybe just tap it and move on without any noteworthy effect at all. There doesn’t seem any rhyme or reason to it.

Making things worse, while the game does provide a “car reset” button (annoyingly requiring pressing in the right stick), this button is only available when you’ve run into a wall, meaning that if you get spun around, you can’t simply reset, you have to either pull a U-turn and get back on the course, or drive yourself into a wall to enable the button’s command prompt to come up.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, every now and then one of these countless collisions will cripple your vehicle, causing it to move extremely slowly. At this point, there’s no reasonable thing to do except reset your car… meaning you have to drive yourself into the nearest wall so the game will actually let you do that. Who the heck thought this was a good idea!?

All of these problems combine with the game’s overly-harsh “checkpoint” system that ends a race if you don’t pass its checkpoints with enough time remaining… something that I will note happened to me even when I managed to get into second place. I have yet to complete a full race in this game’s single-player modes, and the game’s checkpoint system is to blame.

For all its flaws and bizarre design choices, there are still elements of Speedway Racing I find fantastic, and that’s a part of what makes this game so frustrating. If the developers fixed this game’s terrible collision physics, fixed the broken car reset button, made the checkpoint system less harsh, and worked to get the framerates to acceptable levels, this could have been a fantastic Arcade Racer. Heck, its odd eccentricities could have actually been selling points! Unfortunately, its flaws are far too severe to give this game a recommendation, making for a frustrating experience that’s not worth playing.

tl;dr – Speedway Racing is an Arcade Racing game with NASCAR-style racing events. The game mixes some surprisingly good presentation elements with some bad ones and some that are outright bizarre. However, even the good elements here are hard to appreciate with this game’s terrible framerates, bad collision physics, and some really inexplicably awful design choices that make this game an ordeal to play.

Grade: D+

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