Screamer

As a big arcade racing fan I really wanted to like this game but some critical mistakes stop this from being something I can recommend. 1. The two stick steering is really cool in interial drift but this game butchers it. The left stick is basically useless and the right stick controls way too much lateral movement instead of drift angle. It basically steer with the right stick. 2. There is almost no penalty for hitting the walls or going off road. Just boost into a corner and power through, good driving is not required. This is single worst design decision in the game. 3. The game presents the story as an anime which is cool but the actual story is a visual novel which I found boring. The cutscenes are too few and far in between. 4. Online is basically dead. There is a lot of good here but it's over shadowed with poor design. A single update could fix this game for me but I know it will never happen.

Hands down my favourite racing game of the last 10 years (possibly even of all time) Let's start with the most important aspect: the driving mechanics. The left stick is steering as usual, but your right stick is repurposed to determine drifting angle, meaning you have an extra degree of control when driving and can throw the car into a drift at will. While difficult to master, the feeling of finally nailing every corner on a lap is worth the extra effort to get it right. It is difficult to describe this feeling, but every hour I've spent with other racing games since has me longing just to do a few more laps in Screamer instead. Each character has their own unique ability and handling, making it feel like fighting game characters each having their own moves instead of just different cars. Also of note is its 'Semi-automatic' drivetrain--giving you control over upshifts to charge your boost meter, strikes--letting you attack opponents, and overdrive--which gives you a prolonged boost of speed at the cost of getting destroyed on contact with a wall. When all strung together over the course of a race, it's a thrill like no other. On the story: The game uses a visual novel and 3D anime style to tell the story between races, which some may find to be a slog, but the characters and plot are far more interesting and engaging than is usually the case for arcade racers. My biggest problem with the game is that I want to spend more time with these characters, but looking at the game's current popularity it's hard to see a sequel in the future. And that would be a tragedy, but what we do have is absolute magic, and I'd urge anyone with even a passing interest to give it a try. It's clear from some of the other reviews here that it may not be for everyone, but I believe it's worth it to try. It may end up being one of your new favourite games like it did for me.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. As someone who loves arcade racers and Inertial Drift(The game this Screamer game is highly inspired by) which is still the best Twin Stick racing game, Screamer is an abomination to the arcade racing game genre as a whole. Don't get me wrong, there are a few things I like. The Aesthetic combined with a decent amount of visual customization and a satisfyingly large roster of unique handling vehicles. The concept of a Competitive Arcade Racing game with a ranking system was also very appealing, especially since you can party with 2 other people and race as a team. The problem with this concept is really this games largest issue as a whole. The Driving. DO NOT LISTEN TO THE REVIEWS BY PEOPLE PRETENDING TO UNDERSTAND THE MECHANICS OF THIS GAME. There is no "Depth" to speak of here. The drifting in this game feels awful, when you are drifting you're basically understeering sideways depending on the car that you use. Now that wasn't a problem for me at first, I actually thought this would mean you'd have to try and grip around corners and minimize your drift usage, but that doesn't work either, especially with how large the turning circle of some cars are. This game want's you to throw your car sideways, and bounce it off of a wall repeatedly. Most cars need to go agonizingly slow in order to take any form of a racing line, and if you decide to do so online, you will immediately be punished by people mindlessly throwing their car into you with no brakes, because wall riding just isn't punished, its encouraged. The games mechanics make wallriding meta. All you have to do, is shift when the bar is yellow as much as possible, boost into walls because your car can't actually turn and there is no way to cancel the boost to brake. Once you boost a bunch, use your purple charge attacks to BOOST INTO SOME MORE WALLS LIKE YOU'RE ON A HOTWHEELS TRACK, and kill all the other drivers who are slamming into the same wall right in front of you! This game is a joke. Call it a skill issue if you want, the point of an arcade racing game is to make driving fun, and they made this game a wall bouncing simulator. Sure, there is a super boost that you can charge that gives you a very long boost until you crash which will insta kill you, but that's POINTLESS, WHEN MOST OF THE CARS CAN'T TURN. Yes I know you have to brake before a corner and slow down, but the brakes work opposite of how they should. Instead of letting you rotate the car faster the car likes to slow down its rotation before transitioning to drifting in the other direction. The physics just feel aweful. The drift stick is a joke, and they could so easily have made this a single stick racer. They added it to give the illusion of depth to the physics to hide the fact that the cars drive like garbage. The point of a drift stick is to control turning and drift angle independently, and they don't do that. The online is dead, the ranked multiplayer leaderboard has like 70 players on it... It feels like they wrote a story and decided to attach a racing game to it after the fact. GO PLAY INERTIAL DRIFT IF YOU WANT GOOD TWIN STICK DRIFT RACING.

The best character in the game is The Announcer. Now you might say: Her sgu sucks, she can't touch walls, her gearbox sucks, she can't take a lot of shortcuts, her overdrive sucks, etc. But that's the point. If you feel like you are reaching a plateau in skill, pick her up. After a week of only Announcer, you will find yourself playing ANY other character a million times better. The Announcer FORCES you to learn clean lines and boost / strike points. She FORCES you to learn overdriving cleanly. She FORCES you to learn defending yourself without sync for shields. She is the best character because she will make you the best player.

Milestone has done something exceptional here. A story-driven, visual novel-like game with twin-stick drift driving style is... a choice, but I think it works well here. Granted, the story drags a bit sometimes, but I applaud that they tried something entirely different to any other game in today's landscape of racing titles, and it's refreshing to see. It feels like it took me forever to grasp the handling, so I understand that people might bounce off this game hard. In my case, I knew there's something special underneath there, so I kept pushing, and my persistence paid off. So far it's my GOTY 2026. It's a UE5 game, but Milestone managed to deal with the engine pretty well - on my machine, the game runs like a dream, and I was even able to achieve respectable framerates on the Steam Deck. I imagine the Steam Machine should be mostly fine with the game (potentially bottlenecked by 8GB VRAM), but I haven't tried it there yet. I always considered Milestone a "competent but painfully average" dev, but now I think I'm a fan.

I'm genuinely impressed. I don't usually like racing games because they tend to be either simulators or sandboxes with pure driving and customisation. But this one actually got me excited. I really like its style, gameplay and story. It has a sense of purpose and offers a good challenge. The difficult twin-stick control sets it apart from most games in this genre and makes it feel fresh. You can time boosts precisely, destroy opponents and parry their attacks. Each character has their own power, though they're not that different. I also loved the environments and tracks. They're absolutely stunning! The game starts in a city and a forest and then moves on to factories, launch sites and a moon base. The idea of characters speaking in different languages is brilliant, I think it's the first time I've seen this, and the ULT (Universal Language Translator) makes it even more realistic. The dialogue is great: so mature and heartfelt. You can really sense the characters emotions, and the soundtrack fits perfectly too. I wasn't satisfied with the quality of the sprites. They look cheap and are barely animated. I also wish the narrative was more consistent. Having so many short chapters makes it harder to become immersed in the story. And, of course, it's a shame that customisation only works in arcade or multiplayer modes. Other than that, it's an insanely fun racing game that completely hooked me. Even if you don't normally play or like racing games, you might still enjoy this one. I hope you'll SURVIVE!

[b]‣ INTRO TO SCREAMER[/b] Screamer (2026) is an arcade racing game with a story mode based on multiple characters participating in a car racing tournment called "Screamer". The story is already engaging enough, but the gameplay is great too. It has a lot of driving mechanics that feel very fun to use, even for beginners. But, if you can master the controls, it'll be even better. Overall, this is a great car game that breaks a little away from the typical formula we've seen lately in AAA racing games. The visuals are very pretty (even beautiful at some points), the characters and effects have an anime-ish style to them, while the rest of the world looks a bit more realistic and beautiful. This combination of styles works pretty well for me, just like it did in [url=store.steampowered.com/app/1846380/Need_for_Speed_Unbound/]NFS Unbound[/url]. [i]Also, anything I marked with a "black bar" in this review can be considered small spoilers for some parts of the story.[/i] [b]‣ CARS & TRACKS[/b] The cars (which are made up, not real brands) are very good looking, and the texture work on them is insanely detailed. Each car has a set of stats and each character has their own car, you can't mix and match or upgrade them. This isn't a bad thing, in my opinion, since you can challenge yourself to get used to each character/car. However, you can costumize them visually, with items you randomly obtain from finishing races with each specific car. But the customization system feels a little confusing, and you're mostly only changing colours, so I think it could've had some improvement. There is a total of 32 tracks. They all look great, and most of them are fun to drive through. There aren't any crazy jumps or tricks, but there are a lot of turns where drifting feels great, and each track has at least one secret shortcut to find. You can race in a total of four environments (city, forest, industrial zone and [spoiler]space station[/spoiler]), and each one of them has 8 different tracks, taking place at different times of day and weather. So, even though there are only four big locations, most tracks feel different enough, mostly. They all look pretty as hell though, and have a lot of details and stuff happening in the environment around them. [b]‣ STORY & CHARACTERS[/b] The story is the main atraction of Screamer, in my opinion. It is told through either a few fully animated cutscenes, or some visual-novel (VN) sections. And then, you get some gameplay in-between. The animations are very cinematic and well made, they really are the highlight of the story! But the gameplay sections seem a bit too small and sparse when compared to the VN scenes, specially in the beginning. Those scenes are still engaging, and there is some filler, but not enough to be annoying. However, I still wish there was some more gameplay in the early game. The missions aren't always to get to 1st place, which is cool. Sometimes the goal is to wreck a specific characeter during the race, or do something else that the story is asking for. The 15 playable characters are divided in 5 teams of 3 people ([spoiler]but later, you can unlock one more team[/spoiler]). Each individual character has their own motivations, personality, backstory and rivals, even within the same team. The story will introduce these characters and their connections and backstories at a nice pace. The main focus is on the drama between these characters, and it's not some family-friendly drama about who wants to win the tournment, this is all about anger, revenge and even [spoiler]death and murder[/spoiler]. But there is also this bigger threat that they have to worry about, and it gets crazy... like... [spoiler]aliens[/spoiler] level of crazy, which is insane for a car game. It's goofy and over-the-top, but I love it, and the rivalries between the characters are super engaging too. The variety in these characters is also pretty cool. It's amazing that the animations and VN scenes are all fully voice-acted, in each character's own languages! The voice acting is amazing, and the fact that it's not all dubbed to English gives it some charm. This game is also not family-friendly at all, with a ton of swearing (seriously, the Irish lady says the f-word every two sentences) and some blood. But this is also kinda refreshing to see, after to many friendly festival racing games. [b]‣ GAMEPLAY & MECHANICS[/b] Disclaimer: I played with keyboard, don't judge. This game controls great, once you get used to how each car handles. I used the A and D keys to control my drifting, while using arrow keys for movement. But regular movement will not be enough with how fast paced this game is, you will have to drift! And man, is it fun to drift in this game, even if you're bad at it. There are some settings you can adjust to make the game more assessible to your control preferences, but some mechanics are part of the core gameplay, and you can't turn them off. For example, I always play racing games with automatic gear shifts, but Screamer doesn't have this option. Instead, you have a semi-automatic gear shifting mechanic, which sounds weird at first, but it's very gun and useful, and adds a lot to the gameplay. Shifting down is always automatic, but if you input a shift up in the right timing, you'll get a small burst of speed, and some of your boost meter will be filled. This adds a really cool layer of gameplay. You must also hold your boost button to use it, and release it at the right time to get an extra powerful and longer boost. There is also a strike meter, which allows you to use a short but stronger boost that can KO enemies (they'll come back though, for reasons explained in the story). There are even more mechanics, such as the shield and overdrive, but those aren't used as often, so I'll let you figure them out on your own. Each character also has their special passive ability, that is usually related to how they gain or use their boosts and strikes. [b]‣ OTHER STUFF & CONCLUSION[/b] There's an in-game gallery where you can unlock some concept art, the game's music, some other pictures and even all the CG animations, which is very cool. The game usually runs fine on max graphics, but it did skip some frames very rarely. The multiplayer seems to not function very well. Most people complain that it barely works, and, from my experience, it definitly didn't work, I couldn't get into a single match. But hey, there are arcade races against bots, a whole story mode and even local split-screen! There is no free roam, which isn't a bad thing, I don't think this game needs a free roam mode, but I expected some ways to explore a little more for the price they're asking for it. Even then, I think it was worth paying full price for this, because the game is amazing, and I wanted to support a new type of racing game that strays away from the family-friendly car games with barely any story.

Developers of this clown shіt have never played a racing game in their lives. Abysmal.