Gotcha Racing 2nd

Genre: Top-Down Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local, Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Gotcha Racing 2nd is a Top-Down Racing Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2018. The sequel to the 2015 Nintendo 3DS game Gotcha Racing, Gotcha Racing 2nd offers a similar premise – players collect parts from a “gacha” machine to custom-build their own race cars and then compete to earn coins to buy even better parts.

The presentation here is okay, using a mix of simple 2D and 3D visuals, though this absolutely isn’t likely to impress anyone, with the vehicles themselves looking like poorly-crafted paper cutouts of rough approximation of cars. This is backed by an energetic synthesized soundtrack that’s grating more often than it is genuinely exciting.

Gotcha Racing 2nd’s core gameplay loop is an enticing one. The idea of customizing your own vehicle, winning races, and then using the prize money to get even better parts sounds great. Unfortunately, multiple problems keep this formula from succeeding here.

First and foremost, the random element, while exciting, makes it far too frequent for you to get stinkers and repeats when buying parts. There’s not a good balance here, it’s not usually the case where a comparison of any random two parts shows each to offer its pros and cons – some are quite simply better or worse than other parts. And in my spins at the gacha machine, I found myself getting repeats early and frequently, signaling that there isn’t a healthy enough variety of parts in the game.

You do have options for repeat parts – you can sell them at a fraction of the price you spent to get them, or you can fuse them with other parts, offering a chance of a minimal stat boost. However, you’re limited in how often you can do these fusions, meaning that these junk parts have a limited use even as fodder for grinding.

Another problem with the way this game handles the multitude of parts you’ll be collecting is that there’s no way to sort them – these parts are separated into categories and then shown in the order they were received, period. You can’t sort them by their stats or even list them alphabetically to more easily look for duplicates.

On top of that (no, I’m not even done yet), there are only four types of parts you can collect in this game – body, engine, tires, and accessories (the latter of which you can equip two of on a vehicle, and are not available at the game’s outset). For a game with a selling point of being able to customize your own vehicle, this is pretty pathetic, and on a cosmetic level the engine and tires don’t even make a difference.

Okay, so the customization and gacha elements are lacking, but what about the gameplay? Well, if we’re just talking about controls and core gameplay, Gotcha Racing 2nd is a decent, but not great, Top-Down Racing game. There’s not much nuance to the driving mechanics of the game, and the collision mechanics are pretty terrible. Different car bodies come equipped with special moves that can be activated after a cooldown, but often these moves include drawbacks that outweigh their benefits, like an oil slick that speeds up cars that miss it.

However, the game’s problems becomes worse when you factor in the game’s AI racers, which are mindless, personality-free, and right from the first race will repeatedly careen into each other as they try to occupy the same driving path. And since the collision physics are so miserable, this results in a short tap without any significant repercussion for either vehicle, meaning the two vehicles will just keep doing this over and over again until one randomly decides to separate from the other… after which it may simply return to repeat the process.

What’s more, in the game’s single-player races, each race will always include the same lineup of AI-controlled opponents, meaning that you will always be able to predict their behavior ahead of time. Not only does this make these races boring, but it contributes to this game’s repetitive slog of a grind, where you repeatedly race on tracks you know you can beat, with no variation in your competition, until you get the parts you need to get your vehicle’s stats high enough to take on the racers in the next track and repeat the process.

In the end, I wanted to like Gotcha Racing 2nd, but every part of this game is flawed, from the gacha mechanics to the car-building to the gameplay to the AI-controlled opponents. For all the potential this game had, it ultimately only succeeds in demonstrating how gacha machines mostly just lead to disappointment.

tl;dr – Gotcha Racing 2nd is a Top-Down Racing game that has players constructing their vehicles from parts from a “gacha” machine. Unfortunately, nothing this game does works well – the “gacha” parts aren’t varied enough and are poorly-balanced, the vehicle construction doesn’t provide enough options, the core racing gameplay is lacking, and the AI-controlled racers are mindless. This game has potential to offer something different and enticing, but opening this capsule only leads to disappointment.

Grade: D+

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