BAFL: Brakes Are For Losers

If you frequented pizza restaurants in the 1980s, then chances are you're familiar with Super Sprint. It was the overhead racing game from Atari that saw three players spinning their steering wheels with reckless abandon in hopes of speeding past the competition. I've always been a fan of that kind of old school racing game, so I was excited to get my hands on Brakes Are For Losers from first-time developer Oudidon. This is a racer that evokes the spirit of Super Sprint, all while feeling every bit as shallow as that 1986 arcade game.

Brakes Are For Losers is a speedy little overhead racer where eight players compete to see how many laps they can complete before time is up. Don't go in expecting a deep racing simulator, because the emphasis here is on fast cars that you can barely control. Like the name suggests, there are no brakes here. Your car is peddle to the metal the entire time, so the trick is mastering the remote control-style steering and get out ahead of the competition.

Much like Super Sprint, you'll earn a little money from each race that you can spend to upgrade the speed, handling, repairs and more. You'll also be able to race over power-ups and special items on the course, which will do everything from confuse the other drivers to turn the cars into ice to make everything pixelated. That's pretty much the extent of the gameplay.

Unfortunately, Brakes Are For Losers doesn't offer much in the way of content. There are quite a few different race courses and a bunch memorable locations (including space and Jurassic Park), but the tracks themselves start to blur together after a while. It doesn't help that there are only a few championships to race and very little single-player content. This is a complaint you're going to see me come back to over and over again.

The single-player content comes in the form of a challenge mode. The game will throw you into a single stage and want you to keep playing until you beat the set time and completed a perfect race. Complete enough of these challenges and you'll open up a new batch of levels to play through, and so on so forth. It's not an especially involving mode, but it is a good way to practice the stages in between multiplayer sessions.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

And that's really how Brakes Are For Losers is supposed to be played. It's not that you can't have a good time by yourself, but it's a lot more exciting and satisfying when you're racing around with friends. I like that the game makes it easy on everybody, giving you plenty of ways to split up the Joy-Cons in order to get as many people involved as possible. The result may be a chaotic mess at times, but that's part of the charm when you have a bunch of a people huddled around a tiny race course.

The problem is that a lot of the charm disappears the moment your friends put their controllers down. As I played through the challenges and tournaments by myself, I couldn't help but be annoyed by the loose gameplay and how my car would constantly get stuck on the environments. What this game needs is something the player is working towards, such as unlocking new cars or race tracks. A way to create custom courses would have been a lot of fun, too. But instead of getting anything like that, we are left with only a handful of modes and not much to unlock. What you see is what you get with this one.

With friends around, Brakes Are For Losers is an exciting (and often messy) multiplayer affair that is hard to resist. But even under the best circumstances, this debut release from Oudidon quickly runs out of gas. There's just not enough content to keep you coming back, especially if you're looking to play by yourself. Brakes Are For Losers does a good job of evoking the spirit of games like Super Sprint, but doesn't update the formula enough to be as memorable.