Editing up this review. The original review was at about the 5-hour mark. This one now is at the 18/19-hour mark, plus I've had a chance to communicate with the devs a little. Shortening up my thoughts from what I originally thought at 5 hours:
Right off the bat, I could tell this was a great game. Especially for 10 dollars. I could tell lots of love and care went into this game, and I thought (and still think) that if you're a fan of AG racers, you should totally check this game out. Thumbs up, no question. However, the learning curve is incredibly brutal, and it can potentially be a turn-off for some folks.
This game is clearly inspired by classic SNES F-Zero, but to just call it "modern SNES F-Zero" would be doing it a bit of a disservice. This game has some very unique mechanics that allow it to stand out as its own thing. Like F-Zero, you have an energy bar that serves as both your health and your boost, which can be used on the second lap and onwards. However, you also have a "capsule" bar. You collect small capsules scattered all over the track. The more capsules you have, the faster you'll go. However, when you use attacks, you'll spend capsules. Without capsules, you can still attack, but you'll do less damage. On top of this, attacks also give you invulnerability frames, which are important to phase through various obstacles. This is important, because tracks have a lot of obstacles. I find this is a fantastic and very strategic system that gels really well into the gameplay.
You can also drift to gain bouts of speed... if you can pull it off to begin with. It's very awkward, and I don't find myself using it much, because there's basically too much risk for too little reward, but I'll put a pin in that.
There are also flying sections. You'll auto-accelerate, you can move up and down, you can do air tricks to dodge stuff, and you can fire lasers (which cost capsules). You move faster, but it also drains your energy. You can also take advantage of flight to skip chunks of track at the cost of more energy. This is all a very neat concept, but it does play into something that I'll bring up in a bit.
When you're in the lead, you'll also start to encounter "The Fuzz." Cop NPCs will spawn in, and they'll be hellbent on knocking you out of the race. These guys can be incredibly aggressive, and I have some mixed feelings on their presence. But again, I'll get into it in a bit.
Tracks themselves are full of all sorts of obstacles. You have the usual dirt, ice, and lava roads, but you'll also come across turrets, heatwaves, magnets, mines, and much more. There are a lot of things that'll drain your energy, and that's where I initially had a lot of problems.
In F-Zero, things were simple. It primarily focused on boost vs. health. There were obstacles, but nothing to overly-distract you from that core concept of boost vs. health. Here, however, you are going to be coming across a [i]lot[/i] of things that can potentially decimate your energy. There is [i]so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ much[/i] coming at you at once, it can feel incredibly discouraging to take risks. I rarely ever wanted to boost, because some obstacles like the heatwave would just be flat out unavoidable, and I didn't want to risk not having enough energy. Magnets at lower speeds were so absurdly powerful that even the AI couldn't take some turns properly, and you'd just watch helplessly as you're forced to grind across a lava road. Cops have incredibly good aim when it comes to their shunt attacks, and I'd find myself flying off the course because of them. Turrets during midair sections would fire so many lasers that inevitably one or two would hit me, no matter how much I'd spam dodge moves. Then there's the casino track...
The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ casino track. Pardon my french. You are quite literally at the mercy of RNG as bumpers appear everywhere and capsules open up your own personal slot machine, where you have a fair chance to get triple skulls and, you guessed it, lose more energy.
On top of all this, the physics can be outrageously brutal. If you hit a wall, you'll either come to an abrupt stop and take ages to get back up to speed, or you'll mimic Flubber stuck in a pinball machine as you uncontrollably bounce around everywhere. This plays into what I mentioned earlier with the extremely awkward drift. I don't like to even attempt drifting, because every time I try, my performance gets hindered so drastically, it just doesn't feel worth it.
At the 5-hour mark, I thought, "I want to love this game. I love AG racers. But this game is not loving me back, and it's making it very hard to stay invested." However, I wanted to stick with it, because I knew there was something really good here. Suffice to say, I'm glad I did. So, here are my more current thoughts:
This game is not impossible to master, by any means. You absolutely can overcome a lot of this stuff. There is a groove. And when things click, they really, really click. I was starting to notice things I never noticed before, I was getting better at figuring out what to prioritize, when to boost, when to brake, how to approach things, what characters excel at what, and I was starting to find myself improve at tackling this game's sheer brutality. It felt like climbing a mountain, but the peak was completely worth it.
But that's the thing. You have to know going in that there's a very high level for entry. This is not a friendly game. It will not hold your hand. The tutorial even flat out warns you this will be a tough experience. You might not "get it" right away, and it's gonna be extremely frustrating, but if you give it time, you'll see there's something really special here.
To talk about some other stuff in this game, there are plenty of modes to choose from, and you're gonna want to try most of them, because you only start with 5 of the 20 characters, with the other 15 being unlocked through this game's achievements. Some are pretty easy to get, others... not so much. Every character plays quite differently, and they're all absolutely oozing with personality and world-building. Going back to the modes, there's also just quite a lot to [b]do.[/b] And custom races allow you to set up some pretty crazy rules, if you wish. There are also workshop tracks and an in-game track editor, which really up how much you can do in this game.
Lastly, I've had the chance to visit this game's Discord channel and meet a couple devs, and they are incredibly kind and attentive, and they do plan on patches to further improve this game. So please, if this game interests you at all, it's dirt cheap. Support the developers. They really earned it, and I hope this game gets some more attention in the AG racing scene.
