I’ve been reviewing and talking about games for over 15 years and during that time very few games have been total busts. I’m talking about games that bring absolutely zero joy or happiness to me as a player. Racing Champions is going to be a game placed on that very short list. It is one of the poorest gaming experiences I’ve endured in the last decade and I paid £2.39 for the privilege.
Racing Champions is a 1-4 player local splitscreen racer that gives you three types of cars to race, each with slightly different physics. The rally car handles best, the monster truck is slow, floaty and pondering, and the formula car wheelspins in a straight line and can’t be kept straight. All three cars handle inconsistently and veer wildly from unresponsive to a hard left turn in an instant. The three cars have their own set of tracks to drive but they aren’t evenly distributed. This means the formula cars only have 5 tracks whereas the others have many more.
Making the handling worse is the camera angles Racing Champions adopts. It has a pseudo-isometric viewpoint that is off to the side and above which reminds me of 90’s RC car games. It’s too low and close for the reaction times of the car physics. It also feels like you can never drive in a straight line – especially in the formula cars – and you’ll zig-zag across the road. Bringing the camera further out doesn’t help either because it then hovers like a drone around the inside or outside of each corner making understanding the turns tricky. You’ll often overshoot on purpose to just make it round the corner, or just bounce off the barriers as sometimes it’s faster and easier to ram your way through.
Overshooting is a proper race tactic because the AI cars in this game are aggressive and suicidal. They’ll sideswipe, ram into your back in corners, drive over each other, go the wrong way and sometimes spawn into the race backwards… or not at all. When even the AI doesn’t turn up for the game, you’ve got problems. Monster trucks can’t get around turn 1 of half the courses they have. Formula cars end up stuck in the tyre barriers. Rally cars do a bit better as they are smaller but it is really slim pickings when the game implodes every race. There is also some strange rubberbanding that randomly boosts a car’s engine power, making it overly powerful for no reason.
These problems all compound each other. You can’t drive properly as the physics and camera are wonky. The tracks are dull and samey, with lots of 90-degree bends that encourage AI divebombing. You can’t race properly because of all of the above. Take it into local multiplayer and things are a little calmer and straightforward but the cars are so unpleasant to drive, you’ll not want to stay playing this for more than 10 minutes. At least the game didn’t totally crash I guess…
I haven’t been so angry at how a game had been made, devoid of any quality control or product testing, for ages. This feels like a generative AI experiment gone wrong and then published on the cheap. It even mimics the Race Arcade logo, from a game that goes a lot of this gameplay but a hell of a lot better. I spent £2.39 and hastily put this review together to tell everyone – do not touch this with a bargepole. It is barely functioning and the moment-to-moment gameplay is hideous. Racing Champions is one of the worst racing games I’ve ever played and since I’ve been gaming for nearly 40 years, that’s quite an achievement!
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