Horizon Chase Turbo

Genre: Arcade Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Splitscreen)

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Review:

Horizon Chase Turbo is an arcade-style Racing game that takes the style of classic faux-3D racers like Sega’s Out Run series and gives it an actual 3D upgrade while keeping the retro-style design of those actual games.

Visually, this game looks fantastic, in a stylized retro sorta’ way. The game has a look that’s clearly intended to mimic what classic faux-3D arcade racing games would look like if they used actual 3D graphics, and it pulls it off brilliantly, with fast-paced, colorful, beautifully-stylized visuals. It’s nothing that’s really pushing the Switch’s hardware, but it’s still quite visually appealing, with a crisp resolution and smooth framerate.

This game also brings the gameplay of those older games into the present as well, and here I feel that the results are a little more mixed. Rather than one continuous journey with a ticking clock like the Out Run games had, this game has self-contained courses where you aim to simply place first, as with most racing games. To kinda’ mimic the old-school “time running out” mechanic, this game has players racing with an increasingly dwindling fuel supply, necessitating snagging fuel pickups on the track. Given how fast-paced the racing is, it’s very easy to not see these or other pickups (point pickups and turbo boosts) until it’s too late to aim for them, so this seems like it’s pushing players to memorize the tracks. That’s… fine, I guess, but I wish the game had some other more compelling mechanic to add variety to the gameplay.

The other issue here is, this game mimics the same sort of controls that were in those old arcade racers, which means stiff movement that often feels less like driving an actual vehicle and more like fighting an animal tugging you one way or another. Taking turns in the track feels less like actually turning in a vehicle and more like fighting against being pulled toward the opposite edge. Again, this is much in line with those classic arcade racers, but I can’t help but feel that this is one facet of those games that has aged poorly.

What Horizon Chase Turbo does, it does very well. It aims to be a modernization of classic arcade racers like Out Run, and it absolutely delivers that. It’s just a bit disappointing that it also retains much of those games’ outdated gameplay – while it’s still good, it feels dated.

tl;dr – Horizon Chase Turbo is a modernization of classic arcade-style Racing games like Out Run, and it delivers a fantastic modern retro experience that does justice to those old classics. That said, it retains much of the gameplay of those old games as well, and that gameplay hasn’t aged as well as the nostalgia surrounding these games.

Grade: B-

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