This game reminds me of Lunistice.
Lunistice is a small platformer that presents a story told by completing every levels at 100%, which means collecting all the knick knacks throughout and then doing one more platforming challenge to acquire a file that would reveal more of the story in each worlds of the game. This is a good way to add story or lore to the world of a game when we're on a low budget, because although it goes in the realm of "tell don't show", it sells a mystery to uncover, an understanding of the world to discover every time we do good in a video game. This is how I felt every time I unlocked a piece of Arc Racer's historical timeline.
I'm more story driven when it comes to games. Learning the lore about the world and characters is one of the ways I like to progress and perform in games, F-Zero GX being my favorite example of that. Every time I learned ArcRacer's mechanics, everytime I pulled an S rank, everytime I completed a challenge and a golden seal of approval was stamped besides a cup, I knew I was gonna be treated with some details about the evolution of racing, in a world where antigrav became tied to the evolution of humanity during ecological crisis, government restructing and the advent of what Arc Racer is today (on a side note, it's some pretty dang good writing for optional text you can find in a guide, and I love that attention to detail).
I'm more of an F-Zero guy myself, and other then BallisticNG which I have a few hours on, WipeOut as a franchise remains somewhat foreign to me. That being said, anything Antigrav peeks my attention, especially with an art style that is that great. It brings the ps2 era type of energy with it's Metal Gear Solid VR mission-esque way of blending text, borders and color palette to create this sense that we're hacking into something, accessing it by illegal means, which fits with what ArcRacer repensents lore-wise.
I guess my one criticism would be music, not that any songs are bad, Tempxa did a really solid job. However I does gives me similar vibes to Tube Slider's soundtrack, in the sense that there are interesting ideas in each tracks and I'll gladly listen to a few of them outside of the game. I would have loved a couple more bangers to the tracklist, especially considering the length of the campaign (I assume it would last me about 10 hours, haven't played the last two cups after getting all the Historical timeline parts). Even some slight variations like with "Hydrocyan Act 2", but for each tracks, would have been amazing and would have been enough to add variety to the soundtrack. unfortunately I put music from other games after the 3-4 hour mark. I love crimson twilight but when I do ten races and I keep hearing it in six of them, sometimes in a row, the lack of diversity in the tracklist gets to me. That's my personal take.
Overall, an amazing game, it is worth the 10$ price tag, great gameplay, great physics like everybody said, great soundtrack despite my criticisms of it's length and quantity of songs, great art style and great lore tied to the gameplay. A great package and I hope to play more games made by you.
Take care!
Ori
