Xenon Racer

pessimo jogo de corrida

I hated it at first. Now that I've tried Screamer (which sucks, IMO) - coming back to this years later, I like it.

On the positive side of things, Xenon Racer is a pure arcade experience, with drifting, boosting, and an authentic sense of speed. The tracks are engaging, with lots of technical elements and bright, popping colours, and the cars, whilst adorned with some rather tacky looking aero elements, are otherwise smartly designed. All of these things are tied together with solid graphics and performance, and a pretty decent soundtrack. So it's unfortunate that I can't recommend Xenon Racer, because all of those quality elements are undermined by core mechanics and physics that are just... off. The AI is [i]laughably[/i] bad; watching cars pile into a right angle corner for the first time is funny and then, after that (and particularly if you happen to be caught up with them), it's just annoying. those same racers will frequently catch up with you, in spite of their poor mastery of the steering wheel, and in some circumstances, exponentially blaze away from you into the distance if they get ahead. I honestly don't mind a little bit of overconfident rubber-banding in racing games; it keeps the pressure on and the race interesting, but in this game it feels [i]noticeably[/i] broken and can lead to races that are completely unwinnable off the grid, especially if you get wiped out by your opponents' crazy disregard for corners. And then there's the handling which, most of the time, just compounds the frustration. Initiating and holding drifts can be difficult and some cars seem outright adverse to it, with specs that make them outright useless in the game that is all about drifting. There are times when the car seems to not respond and the brakes seem to be useless in all circumstances. The UI on menus is pretty rough and there's some elements that I wish could be turned off (such as racer names over vehicles, and the location of some text pop-ups). I think a lot of other reviews have this one right: Xenon racer [i]can[/i] be fun, in fact I'd go so far as to say it [i]can[/i] even be excellent at times. But, all too frequently, it's just neither of those things, thanks to egregiously bad rubber banding, inconsistent and often immersion shattering AI behaviour, and unpredictable car handling.