Little Racer

Genre: Top-Down Slot Car Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Included in Little Racers + Red Wings: American Aces bundle, along with Red Wings: American Aces.)

Little Racer is a Top-Down Slot Car Racing game that gives you simple controls only slightly more involved than what you’d have on an actual slot car track – the left trigger accelerates, and the right trigger let’s you switch lanes. Using just these controls, players must race in much the same way as you would with slot cars – try to go around the track as fast as possible without crashing.

That last bit is just in theory though – in practice, you will be doing a lot of crashing in this game. You crash if you take a turn too fast, you crash if you run into an obstacle on-course, you crash if you run into one of the other racers… and every time you do, the game takes a moment to reset your position.

The frustrating thing is, there really seems like no way to avoid this. Stuck in a group of cars with an obstacle coming up? You can either crash into the obstacle or try to change lanes and crash into a car. Collisions in both lanes coming up? You can either stay and crash or switch lanes and crash. Given that there’s not even a brake button, slowing down and waiting for the crash to clear isn’t really an option, and since all tracks only have two lanes, there’s very little opportunity to move around obstructions if a group of cars is trying to avoid the obstruction all at once, or if both lanes are obstructed at the same time.

Very, very quickly it becomes clear that there’s no skill to be had with gameplay like this, and no fun either. When races boil down to who can manage to luck into the fewest crashes, and every race is filled with crash after crash after crash, the entire thing just ends up seeming pointless.

What’s more depressing is that this game is absolutely overflowing with content. There are 130 built-in tracks to race on, and if that wasn’t enough for you, there’s even a full-fledged track creator where you can make a track with all the corkscrews, loop-de-loops, and crossings you want… but unfortunately all still with the same terrible gameplay that makes this game unplayable.

As far as the presentation goes, even with the simple, basic visuals this game uses it still runs into problems. Firstly, whenever a player crashes into an obstacle, the obstacle scatters, making it harder to see which lane it’s in. It’s also difficult to tell if an obstacle is still obstructing the road or if it’s just remaining there after a collision… or if it has re-spawned. It’s a shame this game’s visuals detract so much from the already-terrible gameplay, because they do have a nice style to them.

Oh, I might as well mention the game’s sound too. Repetitive, generic-sounding “jazzy” music and car sounds so quiet you won’t even notice they’re there unless you shut your eyes to try to pick them out.

Overall, Little Racer is one of the most frustrating games I’ve played in a while, because the things it gets right, it gets really right – the style is good, and the amount of content here is fantastic. Unfortunately, what this game gets wrong, it gets very, very wrong, and that laundry list of complaints starts with “gameplay” underlined. This game is not fun to play, and all the style and content simply cannot change that.

tl;dr – Little Racer seeks to reproduce the fun of competing on a slot racing track, and it has a good sense of style and a lot of content, including a superb track creator. Unfortunately, none of this matters as the gameplay is absolutely horrible, with crash after unavoidable crash making races less about skill and more about who has the patience not to drop the controller and never play this game again. Don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D

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