Voxel graphics are inherently playful and tactile. The square blocks remind me us of Lego, Duplo and building blocks and a simple way to build little contraptions. In Pixel Car Racing: Blocky Crash all the vehicles you can drive are built from voxel blocks and so is most of the track furniture that can get in your way and slow you down. Just like anything you’ve built, if you damage these cars, bits will fall off them and that’s the main gimmick of this playful racer.
Pixel Car Racing feels like a transitional racer as it can be more challenging than kart racers that allow auto steer, brake and drive – but not by much. It has auto accelerate so you’ll be using the arrow keys on your keyboard to steer your vehicle and space to use a pick up. It is almost impossible to go backwards but by definition sometimes its difficult to drive away quickly if you end up stuck head on into a wall. Regardless of how well you drive though, you’ll always be rewarded with cash which you can use to upgrade your top speed, acceleration, handling and armour. Just make sure you upgrade evenly to avoid tricky handling that doesn’t match the top speed. Cars are largely quite sticky with some initial lazy understeer for tight hairpins that only gets better through upgrades. The handling is neutral and easy to learn and understand.
The games main mode is career. Here you unlock a giant map full of different routes to race on. Each race provides cups for finishing in the top 3 and an additional cup for collecting every coin in the race. You must collect a certain amount of cups across those races to unlock the next area and doing so means your current environment is opened up in single race mode. In single race mode, seemingly randomised routes around the entire environment are drawn out meaning you aren’t quite sure of where you’ll race each time. Its a really nice initiative that keeps the game fresh since you can replay any of the permanent layouts in career anyway.
During a race every time you hit a wall, some of the destructible voxel environment, land from a jump ramp or get hit by another AI’s weapon, your vehicle is damaged. Voxels fly off like specs of dirt and lay around the edge of the track. Lose all your voxels and you’ll explode and lose time respawning. Drive over one of the many health pads though and whatever voxels are near you are magnetically pulled onto your car and you’ll be back to full health. What I love about this is that you can start off with a blue car and end up with a multicoloured machine where you’ve picked up grass, someone else’s car or maybe some blockade pieces. You can swap out between any unlocked vehicles for each race and some do run better on longer straights compared to tighter corners as you battle for the win.
All of this fun is slightly undermined by a couple of factors. Firstly, rubberbanding is rampant. You can be well out front and suddenly an AI driver will have double top speed. Equally odd is sometimes they’ll drive like a snail right at the end. Its garishly obvious and causes frustration both ways. The currency it takes to unlock some of the vehicles is odd too. There’s a green currency that feels like its left over from the mobile version as if these are paid vehicles. Instead for the PC version, you get green currency so rarely it takes a disproportionately long time to unlock even one of those vehicles. The grind would be more paletteable if multiplayer racing was included but this is a strictly single player experience. Thankfully, there are tons of tracks to unlock to keep you interested though.
I feel like Pixel Car Racing: Blocky Crash has a lot of the basics nailed. I love the voxel smashing, the random tracks in single race and the general art direction and style of the game. If the rubberbanding was toned down and difficulty settings were added, this would make the game more scalable beyond the “its cute and easy” kart racing crowd to interest the older retro racing crowd too. As it is though, its fun in short doses.
Review copy provided by developer. Out on Steam in 2024.
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