Tokyo Xtreme Racer

I spent about 40 hours with Tokyo Xtreme Racer and had a really good time for about half of that, spread out sporadically over my experience. It's very easy to play it what I suspect is "wrong", making your progress very laboured at points. It does jolt alive at times when your "level" and car's performance is truly neck and neck or even slightly below your opponent, and you win through a devious split second manoeuvre. It's at its worst as you either effortlessly blast past endless numbers of random opponents, or have backed yourself into a perk/upgrade unlock corner and find yourself suddenly woefully underpowered, watching those random opponents speed off into the distance seconds into a race. The feeling of aimlessly racing an endless stream of opponents is exacerbated by what I found to be a very opaque progression system. Frankly, I never really got a firm grasp on which races advance the game, making a lot of it feel like digging yourself out of a hole without knowing which way is up. But the fundamentals are good. It feels really good to drive, it has a really satisfying escalation of the types of cars you drive and how fast they go. The battles can be really intense and fun, and have video game ways to measure winning and losing that are perfectly applied. The way the "open world" is all, effectively, track, eventually has you learning the routes and you get better at navigating them during races the way you would a more deliberate and linear racer. I liked it a lot, just not all of the time.

Great throwback to the Sega Dreamcast days, but with improved everything. Would recommend. Music gets a bit repetitive, but Spotify (or music source of your choice) can fix that.

Good game, but there is a serious optimisation issue; for some reason it burns my cpu and gpu over 20°C hotter than Cyberpunk with full pathtracing does. Dropping any of the graphics settings makes it look god-awful. If this gets fixed I will change the review to recommend.

Thoroughly just enjoying this game, can sit for hours and get lost in the battles and building cars. Brilliant. 10/10.

A racing game with "boss" AI that rubberbands and corner without following the laws of physics. It's nice to have a challenge, but it is unfair to constantly lose to an AI that does not need brakes.

It took me back to the Y2k era and I am glad for it. Despite all the flaws it is nice to play something else besides stale formula of open-world arcade racers.

played the original on Dreamcast on release, love to see this updated version of it that's even better in all ways.