Super Arcade Racing

Genre: Top-Down Racing

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

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Review:

Super Arcade Racing is a Top-Down Racing game released on PC and mobile devices in 2019, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020, and then brought to PlayStation 4 in 2022. This game has players in an absurd story that follows a race car driver entering a competition to track down his kidnapped little brother.

This game’s presentation is superb, featuring excellent retro-style pixel art visuals with a ton of personality and a lot of nice detail in the tracks, with destructible environments and all sorts of other little events that happen as cars speed by. This is backed by a synthesized soundtrack that’s a decent accompaniment to this game’s style, but isn’t especially memorable.

When it comes to this game’s gameplay, what’s here is mostly decent, but the turning at the game’s onset is really sluggish. There is some potentially fun RPG-style progression, but unfortunately players have no control over what upgrades unlock when, meaning that you’re pretty much only upgrading what the game wants you to upgrade. Dangling this sort of customization in front of the player but only drip-feeding it to them seems like something that may have been better off just not including at all. I should also mention this game’s online multiplayer, which is deserted at the time of this writing, so if you want to play in multiplayer you’ll have to supply your own opponents.

I really wanted to like Super Arcade Racing better than I did. The retro-style visuals are so good, and the RPG mechanics had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the turning controls mess things up from the start, and the game refuses to let you upgrade your vehicle the way you want to, being miserly in how it allows you to access those aforementioned upgrades. The result is a game that feels like it could have been much better than it is. If you’re looking for an old-school Racing game, this may still interest you, but its problems keep it from being a truly great entry in the genre.

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tl;dr – Super Arcade Racing is a Top-Down Racing game with a wonderful retro aesthetic, and an RPG-style mechanic that had a lot of potential… but unfortunately, that potential is ruined by the game’s refusal to allow players to upgrade their vehicle how they want, instead drip-feeding them upgrades to control their progress. Add in deserted online multiplayer and you have a game that is still a decent old-school Racing game, but in so many ways it feels like it had potential to be something more.

Grade: C+

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