Night Racer

Review

You and your competitors are about to race on a pitch-black night. The engines are roaring loudly, and everyone is waiting for the race to start. Are you going to be the one who reacts the fastest and storms to the first position by the first corner? Perhaps you will be the one who totally stuffs up the start and then makes a comeback by passing everyone to take the race!  You only have a few laps to finish at the top in Night Racer.

Night Racer is an arcade racing game developed and self-published by Smash Game Studios on the 23^rd of June 2022 on the Steam platform as an Early Access.

The current version of the game consists of an Arcade, a Time Trial, a championship, and a multiplayer mode with 9 available tracks and 12 cars for selection. The Arcade and Time Trial are basically the same where you have to try to complete 3 laps on the chosen track as fast as possible. In the Multiplayer mode you can create a room and wait for players to join (you might wait for a while) or join the existing rooms (which I assume has been created by the developers) where you race the same bots over and over again. And then there’s the Championship mode where you have to unlock 7 championships, each one harder than the previous one.

I actually had fun playing the championships, but the game at this stage is really slim overall. The 9 tracks currently available are basic. They look like a mixture of roads, with wooden ramps in a rocky environment. They are short, which suits this type of game, but there's not much in the way of perks.  The only things you can pick up are crates, which will give you additional points at the end of the race that you can use to upgrade your favourite cars. You do have a few boosters here and there; when you drive onto them, your car receives a boost for a few seconds and that’s about it. To crash a car, it will have to either roll on its roof or be bummed off the track.

As the track designs are average at the moment, one of the best aspects of the game is the car customisations. This too is a tad light but I thought it was fun. You can choose the colour, add a topper to your roof and change the boost visual effects. The other positive aspect is that all the cars that I played with behaved slightly differently to each other. That was fun!

Even if the graphics are somehow simplistic, they are quite good. The soundtrack has a good beat to it and is fun to listen to, although it is repetitive and needs other tracks on the loop. The gameplay itself is decent but the game needs more content in terms of tracks and cars. Maybe additional boosters, perks and longer tracks might lift the game to another level. As the game is listed as Early Access, we’ll have to wait and see.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

Night Racer Steam Store Page