The renaissance of retro racing games fills me with life and Fire Race is a solo developed game that goes for the 2D top down SNES racing style. It has a couple of interesting gameplay mechanics that reward risk and skill but ultimately there a few things not quite flowing well at launch which makes this game tough to recommend.
Across 30 tracks, you’ll be racing against 4 AI drivers in F1 styled cars. The SNES pixel art is beautiful and you move around the tracks without screen tear or any slow down. There isn’t an accelerate or brake button. Instead you push your analogue stick in the direction you’d like to drive and off you go. Fire blasts out the back of the cars and whilst you can’t collide with other racers, you can definitely hit barriers and other on track obstacles. You need to place in the top 3 to progress to the next round but completionists will want to win all 30 races, collect every purple coin on their way and score a certain amount of drift points to win all 5 stars per event.
Drifting is the critical element in Fire Race because if you drift around a corner, you’ll not only score points but increase your overall top speed. Chaining drifts improves this feat too but its difficult to tell by how much because the speedometer in game is broken and doesn’t reflect your boost. You’ll be able to tell in relation to the AI though. The big problem is that drifting seems to only work half the time. After playing Fire Race for an hour, I wasn’t sure if its just me not getting the hang of it or whether its because I was using the analogue stick on a controller and the game was having a hard time telling if I was properly turning a corner or not, but its wildly inconsistent. In the rare instance I didn’t get on the podium it was partly down to boosts not working or me clipping barriers on tight hairpins.
Whilst the drifting was annoying, the amount of rubbish on track annoyed me more. Tumbleweed, rocks, ice patches, banana peels and stalagmites litter the circuits to such a point where the first lap is a complete lottery. Every is constantly running into something, clearing the way for a proper race for laps 2 and 3. I don’t mind a challenge but this felt a bit too much as it was frustrating and lacked any kind of flow for most opening laps of a race. Afterwards, great arcade racing could take place and I think that’s why I found it so aggravating. When Fire Race is in full flow at full speed, its great fun to play and very satisfying to get a lap right. The game is just not designed to let you reach that peak for more than 10 seconds though.
30 tracks for £4 is a great deal, although most 3 lap races are over in a minute. The game plays well once you’ve cleared the obstacles from the track and there are moments of arcade 1990 heaven that seep out here and there. I feel like this developer is primed for a superb sequel if they wanted to and the lack of local multiplayer options feels like an own goal. I can only recommend this to genre enthusiasts and even then, there are so many other retro racers I’d put ahead of Fire Race. I don’t regret buying it, but its not going to be a game I remember.
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