Way back on the PS1, there was an interesting take on Olympic sports games. The game was called Syndey 2000 and it forced you to focus on training your athletes through various minigames to improve their stats before you could ever get near the Olympics itself. It isn’t something many other athletic sports games have tackled since yet Faster Than Bolt zones in on this specific gameplay loop and takes it to the extreme.
In Faster Than Bolt, there is only one event – the 100-meter sprint. You start out at a national level with an athlete with minimal stats. Through a vigorous and quickfire round of minigames at the gym, you’ll be able to improve your stats before the next race. Speed, stamina, your end dash, and your start reactions are all stats you can boost and if you don’t do well enough in the minigames, you simply won’t be able to overcome the main race event by button mashing. This is because your stamina will deplete so quickly, that you’ll top out at too low of a top speed to win or break records. It is a unique design decision because everything outside of the main event really dictates your ceiling of skill in the race.
Those training minigames revolve around push-ups, sit-ups, boxing jabs, reaction times and other gym activities. They all require you to either press buttons in a certain order quickly, time a button press, or occasionally button mash. It is here where Faster Than Bolt moves from an intriguing title to one full of untapped promise. The controller input lag is crazy. Sometimes it takes half a second for a button press to register on the PS5 version I purchased. The user interface doesn’t help either, sometimes fading in slightly jankily whilst your movements are timed for grading. This is an issue mainly because Faster Than Bolt deems anything that takes more than half a second per button press as B- or worse. Thankfully each minigame is announced as your character sprints around the gym to kickstart the next minigame (they are selected at random) so if you memorise the controls you can have a chance to score well. Sadly, you’ll be guessing when the timer kicks in and the game will fail you for jumping early. This happened to me repeatedly and if you get three strikes, the training ends early and your stats hardly improve at all.
This input lag carries over into the race itself but it causes much less of a problem here. The start has a meter that leads you in, slowing down time to enable you to launch out the starting blocks well. Button mashing and the final dash don’t require timing precision so the race runs quite smoothly despite the basic graphics. The races are over in 30 seconds though, and then its back to a quickfire minigame round to hope you guess the timing right this time.
With this input lag, the game was a chore to play. I was able to get the gold medal on my first attempt but the trophies for breaking certain records require near-perfect guessing of minigame timings to keep up the stat increases required to clear the goals. It all felt very frustrating and pointless to play. An online leaderboard, which charts your overall career score, also showed that most players haven’t quite gelled with the laggy controls either. There is also no multiplayer either, rendering this a single-player button masher with limited appeal.
We are long overdue for a decent track and field game. Tokyo 2020 was fun in a Wii+ arcade chaos kind of way but it was also quite simplistic. I long for the balance of challenge and reward that the 90’s and 2000’s Olympic and track and field games gave us. Faster Than Bolt doesn’t scratch that itch, and if it did, the itch would have moved to a different area half a second earlier.
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