ACA NEOGEO Thrash Rally

Genre: Top-Down Racing

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Thrash Rally is a Top-Down Racing game originally released in 1991 in arcades and on the NEOGEO home console. The game has players driving through courses going through various real-life locales.

Thrash Rally uses 2D pixel art visuals that have some really nicely-detailed and colorful environments that do a great job of adding variety to an otherwise somewhat repetitive game, and overall I think these visuals hold up very well by modern-day standards.

As for the gameplay, Thrash Rally has decent controls and might have been a solid entry in the genre, but it’s hampered by a point of view that’s too zoomed-in on the action, making it difficult to see upcoming turns and hazards. I feel like if this wasn’t the case, this would be a much more enjoyable game.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to get as far as they can in one run. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game gives players a decent array of options, including various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, online leaderboards, and the ability to play both English and Japanese versions of the game.

In the end, Thrash Rally was almost a solid Top-Down Racing game that would have held up by today’s standards, but the choice to keep things so zoomed-in that you can’t anticipate upcoming turns and hazards really keeps this from being a better game. And at $8, I feel players on Nintendo Switch can do better than this.

tl;dr – Thrash Rally is a Top-Down Racing Game that has some good visuals and decent controls, but the zoomed-in view makes it too difficult to anticipate upcoming turns and hazards. Players looking for a good game in this genre have better options on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C-

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