There’s many games in the franchise but this is the first I’ve played. It’s a multiplayer racing game with a custom track editor. Your car is an open wheel design, with a speed and position displayed digitally on the back of the car.
This version is free to play, but you are encouraged to buy one of the membership tiers. It’s cheap at ~£8 with many of the options locked behind this paywall. The UI was really unclear what you could actually access. I held off paying until I decided if the game was for me or not; it wasn’t.
In the main mode, you race against others in real-time but you see the players as ghosts, so there is no option to ram you. The tracks are short, and you have 5 minutes to set your best time. If you fall off the track, you press the B button (Xbox controller) to quickly reset back to the start, or Y to reset to the last check-point. The restarting is fast which I appreciate, but I didn’t like that it was a single tap, especially when B is usually designated the hand-brake in racing games. Out of habit, I sometimes pressed it to turn the hasher corners and was raging when it respawned me back to the start.
The tutorial has very brief tracks which introduce all the different components. Normal turns, half pipes, elevation, jumps, boosts, loop-the-loops, no steering, no engine, slow motion, different surfaces like standard road, curved roads, dirt, grass, and ice.
The thing is, if you give people these tools, the majority of tracks are going to be diabolical. Power corrupts, and not everyone is creative. It wasn’t clear if the tracks I was racing on were user created, or from the developers, but they had the devious style components I expected to find.
The first track I was put on was a nighttime track so it was really difficult to see. Each jump saw me plummeting, because the designer decided to place the track somewhere where you won’t expect, so you basically had to sharply turn left or right as you jumped, and hoped for the best.
I saw plenty of tracks with slanted ice sections. Basically any excuse to try and force you off the track.
Many tracks deviously placed checkpoints - so if you passed through them too slow, you would fail to make a jump, you would want to reset back to your slow pace and fail to make the jump again; forcing you to reset the lap completely.
I’m sure there’s certain people that love games like this and will have a lot of fun with it. But it definitely isn’t for me; the majority of tracks were just designed to annoy people.
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it's coming out to other platforms this year and considering other ubi games are releasing on steam recently i'm sure this one will also be there soon enough (but still with the bullshit ubisoft connect drm thing)
love the new types of terrain to drive on, but man do i hate the yearly subscription service bs
for most people, the $10/year tier is good enough, and with that you keep everything that comes out that year (campaigns and TOTDs)