Gameplay

You've never even FINISHED a race?

As hard as pod racing looked in the film, Racer is a surprisingly unchallenging game. There are four racing leagues: Amateur, Semi-Pro, Galactic, and Invitational. Amateur is a complete joke; this tester finished every race in the circuit in first place the first time playing the game. Semi-Pro is nearly as easy, although in it you can only crash about twice before worrying about losing first place. Skipping Galactic, Invitational is where the game finally got challenging. The first few run-throughs netted 7th place, due largely to the extremely complex course.

Watch out for that tree!

Speaking of courses, the Invitational races were the only courses of any real interest. The Amateur circuit is very linear and fairly straight, and the next two circuits are little improved. Invitational courses, though, present the racer with a myriad of paths to take, lending some variety and excitement to the race. It would be nice if the whole game was more like this circuit.

Wrongway, rightway, wrongway, rightway...

How about the action, huh?

Speaking of things that would be nice, how about some interaction with other pods? The courses are so spread out, and the pods so small, that one doesn't even see the other competitors most of the time. You can't really knock pods around much even if you try, as it's hard to match speed with them, and hard to predict what will happen when you collide.

Hey aren't there supposed to be two rockets?

Fun, you fool! Was it fun?

Being reviewed by a big fan of racing games, Racer has a lot of competition to stand up to. Unfortunately, it stacked up rather poorly. It is definitely, as was stated, an arcade racer, so complexity and ingenuity weren't expected. Entertainment and addictive gameplay were, however, and they were a bit lacking. We found the gameplay in Racer far too run-of the-mill, and not really well done, at that. Something like F-Zero (SNES) is a counterexample; a simple, arcade-esque racing game, with simple yet addictive gameplay.