Fire Race

Genre: Top-Down Racing

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Rô + Fire Race + Scrap Bolts + Milk Seller + Home Sweet Home + Rafa´s World along with Rô, Scrap Bolts, Milk Seller, Home Sweet Home, and Rafa’s World. Additionally, it is included in Family Vacation Bundle / 20 Games, along with .cat Milk, American Man, Axolotl, Bruxa, CatCat, Cats Puzzle, Cooking Craze, Dinogotchi, Hidden Theft, Home Sweet Home, Kitten Island, Last Mage Survivors, Nincat, Rafa’s World, Rô, Scrap Bolts, Scribbled, Submarine Bubble, and The Great Battle of Shark Monkey Squirrel Dinossaur Bird Bee.)

Fire Race is a Top-Down Racing Game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game has players racing and drifting around a track using cars that blast a long trail of fire behind them.

To be clear, this fire doesn’t actually do anything apart from showing whether you’re getting a boost from drifting by changing color. In fact, there’s no collision detection at all with the other vehicles.

And while other Racing games have things like gas and brake, here you just move the analog stick in the direction you want to go, and press B to drift. There’s no nuance here, and the only real skill is timing your turns.

You don’t even need to do that particularly well, as the AI opponents are sluggish and you’ll find yourself easily cruising ahead of the pack. Those wanting any sort of challenge won’t find it in multiplayer either, as this game has no multiplayer.

Even the charm on Fire Race’s 2D pixel art visuals and retro-style chiptune themes are utterly destroyed by some absolutely nasty slowdown. In a more technically-impressive Racing game this would be disastrous, but given how little is going on here, it’s outright embarrassing.

I will admit that careening around the game’s courses with Fire Race’s simple, direct controls can be amusing, but that amusement wears off very quickly when virtually every other part of this game is mediocre at best and laughably bad at worst. Shallow gameplay, lack of difficulty, lack of multiplayer, terrible performance issues… whatever you were hoping to get here, you have countless better options on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Fire Race is a Top-Down Racing Game where players control a car with a blazing fire coming out of its rear. Controlling your car can be fun, but in every other way this game is a flaming wreck, with shallow gameplay, lacking difficulty, no multiplayer, and absurdly bad performance issues. Don’t waste your money on this.

Grade: D+

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