Review #508: Road Trip

 Who said road trips where cheap?

The cover shows you everything that you should expect out of the game.

 Road Trip is not your average racing game, for instance, it's actually part of a longlived series of games called ChoroQ, of which about less than half of its games ever made it outside Japan. These games are based on a popular Japanese line of toy cars, so forget about realism.

 The main mode of the game is Story mode, but there's a 'Quick Race' option, to race in any of 8 tracks with a randomly pre-picked car against random cars as well as a 2 player mode with a few more options. Believe it or not, 'Adventure' is the main dish in this game, a single player mode in which you travel from town to town, performing in races and solving sidequests. This is not your average racing game.

You can even customize your car's speedometer. 

 In the game's world there're no humans, instead it's populated by sentient cars. The President wants to retire and in order to select his replacement he is holding a Grand Prix, so you, being a go-getter, decide to partake in it. But it's not that simple, first you must travel the world and place 6th or higher on six C rank races so that you can get a B-license, then get 6th or higher on the nine B rank races so that you can proceed to A-rank, and finally, after clearing all nine A-rank tracks in 6th or higher, participate in the Grand Prix.

 The story mode is pretty darn great since not only do you have your main goal of winning the Grand Prix, but you've also got a whole slew of side-activities. There're 100 stamps to get, which is done by fulfilling sidequests, simple things like talking to a certain car or a few more involved tasks, like rescuing a kidnapped car by waiting until nighttime and pushing a secret switch behind a bouncer. Some stamps also require collecthatons, like finding all hidden gems or getting every possible NPC into your very own town. There're 100 ChoroQ coins to collect, minigames to find and then there's the customization element. You can buy parts for your car, both cosmetics and inner parts that enhance your performance. As a matter of fact, and to the game's detriment, you'll need to constantly upgrade your car to stand a chance of beating every race. Either that, or do a simple sidequest in Payapaya Island about finding someone's wife that nets you the Jet Propeller, with this you can exchange a bit of fuel, by tapping or holding R2, to activate it and get insane speed. Proper use of the Jet propeller can make races much, much easier.

The racing part of the game is the worst part about the entire game....

 The cosmetic side of things is simple but endearing, there're many different rims and bodies to alter your car, and you can paint your car with a surprisingly robust RGB color dial. As for the other upgrades, these are a bit more in-depth, since, for example, off-road tracks may call for a different set of tires than the ones you've been using for wet pavement. Which sounds great since it adds a bit of strategy to the game, but there's a little big problem: Cash. Earning cash in the game is either tedious or hard. The first thing you can do is try to place high on races, which when you start out nets you up to 800 coins. After a while you can get two team-members and if they place 1-6th they'll also net you money. You can also equip a billboard on top of your car and promote something for a flat rate per kilometer. Eventually you'll realize that your safest bet is to do the first race of whichever rank you are in over and over again, since your CPU allies won't have too much trouble. Oh, and you should also buy parts for them. And then you have to race a bit so that they get used to the new parts. All in all, pretty boring. Worst part about it? You need to outfit your CPUs too since the Grand Prix is a Team effort and the result depends on both you and the CPUs' ranking.

 It's kinda sad how the most boring aspect of the game has to do with the racing, because the adventuring in the game is pretty much fantastic. You're free to explore the world of Road Trip at your leisure. There's a dumb fuel mechanic, but it refills every time you enter a house, and if it runs out you can simply press start and warp to whichever town you want. Regardless, the many different landscapes, the different themed towns and the day-and-night cycle make for a very engaging game, and you can't help but feel like you are in a tiny adventure as you cross bridges, highways and what not. Call me crazy, but the game would've benefited from making the races a sidequest rather than the main goal, or at least giving the player more avenues to make money in order to upgrade and customize your car. For instance, watching your city grow, as you recruit NPCs, is a much more rewarding endeavor.

....but the adventuring is fantastic.

 My final problem with the game were its controls, turning doesn't... doesn't work very well. Even after trying different steering wheels it never felt anything but stiff, only... slightly less stiff. The game could've benefited with drifting mechanics or something to make curves easier to handle. Ironically, for as tough as it is to steer, eventually your car will slide around as if driving through ice. The physics in the game are a bit janky too, your car may sometimes behave a bit weirdly once it hits the air, and the collision between cars feels off, there's no push-and-pull as you collide with another car side-by-side, you both simply kinda stick together. The latter might be intentional as you're supposed to be playing as toy cars... but that doesn't explain why colliding against walls only stops you dead on your tracks.

 The funny thing about Road Trip is that it's a racing game where the Racing part of the game is easily its weakest aspect. And I think the developers knew it which is why you only need to reach the sixth place in every race to qualify. Regardless, the real strength of the game lies in how well it manages to portray what the title of the game promises: A Road trip. An adventure on wheels that takes you from a Urban city, to a feudal Japanese-esque city, to a Casino city in the desert, to... other places that it's best not to spoil. So, it might not succeed at what the developers actually intended to accomplish, but it does succeed in providing a very interesting adventure game... featuring cars.
 8.0 out of 10