Hotshot Racing

It looks archaic now, but I can still remember being blown away the first time I played Daytona USA. From the moment I sat in that giant arcade cabinet and flipped between the camera perspectives, I knew that it was going to be awfully hard going back to those old school racers. That nostalgia came flooding back while playing through Hotshot Racing, Sumo Digital's love letter to Sega's seminal arcade hit. It's the kind of throwback game that manages to look and feel the part, all while offering some of the elements you would expect from a modern racer. But does this homage lose a bit of its identity by focusing on nostalgia? That's what I wanted to find out.

In a lot of ways, Hotshot Racing is exactly what you expect. It's a low-polygon racer with a couple of modes and arcade-style physics, not unlike the early 32-bit racing games that inspired it. There's no story or deep campaign here, but rather the bare essentials to get you speeding around corners and coming in fist. It's the kind of game you might expect to see launch with the original PlayStation or Saturn back in 1995, long before we had to earn a driver's license in Gran Turismo or collect takedowns in Burnout.

In that sense, Hotshot Racing is like comfort food. It's familiar even before you've accelerated on the first straight stretch. It plays exactly how it looks, right down to the over-the-top drifting and super aggressive computer opponents. And because of that, I had no problem jumping in the driver's seat and beating the competition right from the start. Like I said, this is comfort food, and I gobbled it all up.

A large part of the reason why Hotshot Racing is so successful is because of the course designs. The game will have you racing on the sunny coast, through the scorching hot desert, into the jungle and all around the mountain. Each of these four locations has four different tracks, for a total of 16 different levels to race (32 if you include the mirror mode). What this game does incredibly well is make each of these stages stand out with different landmarks and eye-catching flourishes. What the game lacks in quantity is more than makes up for with quality, to the point where I was legitimately excited when certain tracks popped up. From racing through the fossil caves to experiencing the giant fish tank at the marina, every single stage has something awesome I can point to.

Like I said early on, there aren't a whole lot of modes in Hotshot Racing. The main campaign is little more than a Grand Prix, that has you racing through the circuits by competing in four different stages. The idea is to earn money by coming in first, which can be used to unlock different cars, skins and clothing for the eight international drivers. Other modes include a cops and robbers game where you try to avoid being pulled over and an event where your car will literally explode if you don't hit the checkpoints in time. It's a shame that these alternate modes weren't incorporated into the Grand Prix or spun off into something bigger, because there's a lot of potential here.

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True to form, Hotshot Racing runs into a lot of the same problems we saw in Daytona USA and other early 32-bit games. The gameplay is solid, but the computer AI can be aggressive to a fault. I especially don't like how easy it is to get knocked off course, which usually results in spinning out and hitting a wall. It never feels like your car has any weight to it, which can be a problem when a competitor runs into you without notice. There were so many times when I would uncontrollably spin around right before winning the race, which can be especially frustrating in the Grand Prix mode. The good news is that we earn turbo boost for drifting, so it's usually possible to salvage the race and get back to first place. Those are exciting moments, but they don't make up for some of the more aggravating (and unfair) defeats.

It's worth mentioning that Hotshot Racing is awfully similar to a game I reviewed earlier this year called Formula Retro Racing. Both games crib heavily from the low-poly look of Virtua Racing and Daytona USA, which will have some people wondering which is better. For my money, Hotshot Racing easily comes in first. Not only does it look and play better, but it has twice the content and online multiplayer modes. Compared to the vibrant and wonderfully detailed backgrounds found here, Formula Retro Racing comes across as flat and plain. Hotshot Racing is a clear winner.