Care to go for a ride, hotshot?
The game has a very simple graphic style that is made up of simple shapes and very solid, strong colors, that gives it a very striking look, almost as if it was made of voxels, but sharper. The game is very colorful, if anything, I'd say it looked like the classic Ridge Racer games, particularly the first two, before the series went emo with Rage Racer...
...but gameplay feels more akin to modern Ridge Racer. There's slipstreaming, by driving behind racers, as well as a lot of drifting, and both of these maneuvers fill your Boost gauge, which can hold up to four stocks of boost. The one thing I noticed is that the game feels a bit slippery, which is a bit closer to early Ridge Racer games. Still, I got used to it, and had a blast drifting around.
One thing to get in mind is that the game is aggressively beginner unfriendly. Something that I didn't like very much was having to drive through checkpoints under a time limit, otherwise you lose and drop out. I very quickly adapted as I realized how similar it was to Ridge Racer, but my girlfriend did not, and if she fell behind she'd be stuck just watching me play.
On the other hand, the game does offer some rather interesting multiplayer modes, like Cops and Robbers, in which the robbers, as they lose, turn to Cops, and if all robbers are gone the cops win! Another one in which you can drop barrels behind you and a twist on Elimination races, in which if your speed drops you explode.
The game's main mode is, of course, Grand Prix, featuring 5 Grand Prixes of 4 tracks each. Each GP can be played in three difficulty settings. Normal is very Rubber Bandy in your favor, you can make big mistakes but eventually will catch up anyways. On Hard expect to drive behind most racers throughout most of the race! As for Expert, I didn't really try it. Speaking of beginner unfriendly, you can't restart a race in GP mode, if you select Retry it's back to the very first course. That's just cruel!
Vehicles are interesting in this game, because they are tied to different racers. There are about 10 different racers, and each one has their own four cars, each one favoring a different style, such as 'Balanced', 'Speed', 'drift', etc. Each Vehicle can be customized, aesthetically only, with different parts and paintjobs, and you unlock these by using the car itself and completing different objectives, such as drifting X amount of seconds, finishing a GP, etc. It's a really neat way of unlocking stuff, and I loved customizing the cars I loved. Oh! And each racer has their own incredibly cheesy GP ending.
The game feels short, but I think that has to do with how fast it is. You really will zip through tracks very quickly. On another note... I didn't really mind it, because I drive in Automatic, but I found a lot of complaints around controls, as it seems having shift down and up on L/R and Accelerate/Break on ZR/ZL doesn't feel good. I wouldn't know, but I do know that you can't customize the control settings, and this was an issue when I played Ganryu 2 a few weeks ago.
Hotshot Racing was my Ridge Racer fix of the 2022. While I've been comparing this game to RR throughout the entire entry, it was done as praise, 'cause there's no shame in playing like the best. Hotshot is a fantastic little racer, with a small but solid set of mechanics that make it a blast to take on its challenge.
8.0
No comments:
Post a Comment