Victory Heat Rally

Beat Group Alpha and was immediately outpaced by the later courses. Kart racer without the items, arcade style speed. 10/10 fantastic driving model, beautiful graphics, a fun romp.

car go ZOOOOOOM

This is a pretty easy recommend from me. Just some background, I am a pretty casual racing gamer. This is absolutely not my genre of expertise. This is perfectly good and inoffensive arcade-ish racing game priced pretty reasonably. It doesn't live up to its full potential in some aspects, but that hardly holds the game back from geing a lot of fun. Starting with presentation, the game looks great and runs smooth as butter. The race tracks are colorful and come in a variety of themes and races are set up in such a way that it never felt I was spending too much time looking at one particular theme. The game sounds great too. Audio cues are clear as a whistle and every song had me bopping my head to the point that I'd sometimes screw up and drive right into a wall because I was jamming out too hard to pay attention to the road. Gameplay wise, it's a very solid experience. The game places a very heavy emphasis on drifting. The speed boosts you gain increase the longer you drift and they are pretty massive boosts, even if you only drift for a little bit. Race tracks are designed with this in mind and are chock full of exciting and turns. You can even chain drifts together, as in, you can be drifting left and then drift right without breaking your drift, allowing you to build even more boost power through winding turns. It's got some surprising depth. That said, it does fail to live up to its full potential in some regards. The game features an Arcade GP mode, Versus, Time Attack, and Championship mode. The latter is kind of the main mode of the game and were you can unlock other characters. It features short little cutscenes where a host announces and describes the upcoming race tracks and rival racers, but I didn't feel like this brief scenes added anything to the game. Even meeting the other racers is a little disappointing, cuz some of them look like they're brimming with personality in their portrait, but in game they don't ever really express themselves. You have 12 races to choose from. Each racer is distinct from each other in their stats and very nice portrait art, but that's it. In game, despite having voice actors do short line reads when you first meet them in Championship Mode, they don't even have any voice lines to express themselves when you win or lose a race. Championship Mode also kinda runs out of steam by the end. The last race attempts to combine every theme into one race, but ultimately it's just another stadium race. Woulda loved to see something a little more visually stunning for the finale. Another minor letdown is how your car interacts with your opponent's car. When you lap an opponent, hitting that opponent at high speed will send them flying in a fiery explosion and you'll lose barely any speed or traction. It's extremely satisfying. What isn't satisfying is accidentally hitting an opponent you have not lapped yet. You lose a ton of speed and can even give them a significant push forward. I've lost many a race because I just happened to release my boost right when an opponent cut me off. It just feels a little dumb that I'm flying at what must be over 200mph right into some guy's rear end, and he gets a big speed boost while I lose all of my speed just because I haven't lapped him yet. I want to stress that whatever my complaints are, they are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I kinda just put them out there cuz I want to make sure you know what you're getting into. It's not a super masterpiece game with an interesting story mode and interesting characters. It's a pretty simple arcade-style racing game. It's also lots of fun though and with a versus mode, I only wish this game was around when I was a kid cuz I woulda played this game with my dad and brother a ton (dad was a huge fan of racing games). Short version, this game is a lot of fun even if it doesn't always live up to its full potential. I easily recommend it to anybody with even a passing interest in racing games.