Formula Bit Racing DX

Oh, what a difference a camera perspective makes. When I loaded up the new game Formula Bit Racing DX and played using the default, isometric camera perspective, I had a miserable experience. I lagged far behind the competition in every race and grew to hate not being able to see the 90-degree turns ahead of me. But then I found the third-person camera perspective and everything changed. I suddenly started winning races and dominating the circuit. I felt like I was in control, which translated in me having a whole lot of fun. It made me wonder why any developer would default to such an unruly camera angle when there are better options. That’s just one of the questions I have for 2Awesome Studio in this review of their new game, Formula Bit Racing DX.

There’s a chance that this is going to be an incredibly short review, because Formula Bit Racing DX is an incredibly simple game. It’s a throwback racer that is inspired by the low-polygon arcade games of the early 1990s, yet has the amount of content you would expect from a modern racer. It’s a fairly simple, straight-forward game with barely any modes and an identity crisis, but I have a hunch that a lot of people will overlook these issues when they see the dirt-cheap five-dollar asking price.

While Formula Bit Racing is clearly taking inspiration from games like Virtua Racing, there’s never a point where the game feels like Sega’s classic racer. In fact, it doesn’t feel like any of the low-polygon racing games I remember from the 1990s. Before changing the camera perspective, the closest thing the game resembled was RC Pro-Am on the Nintendo Entertainment System. However, when I switched to the more traditional third-person chase perspective, the game managed to feel unique and different. Two words I didn’t expect to say about throwback racing game.

Part of what makes this feel so odd is the level design, where every single corner is a sharp 90-degree turn. There are no gentle corners or round U-turns, just these severe angles you’ll need to negotiate as you compete against five other drivers. This simple design decision makes a big difference on how you approach each track, which ultimately makes this game feel quite a bit different from your typical racing game. I’m not sure if I’ve ever played a game with this many 90-degree turns.

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When it comes to different modes, Formula Bit Racing DX doesn’t have any. It has a single world tour that is split up between four levels – novice, junior senior and master. There are five tracks in each level, each based on countries as diverse as France, Canada, India, Japan, Poland, Switzerland and, of course, the United States. There are twenty courses that you can race in any order you choose, all of which can be raced on either a normal or hard difficulty. And that’s it. Once you’ve raced the twenty courses, the game ends and you look for something else to do.

This points out the game’s first big problem – there’s no multiplayer support. In that sense, this game isn’t like the low-poly arcade racers of the early 1990s, because those were built around competitive multiplayer races. Instead, this is more like the arcade racers of the 1980s, when it was common to compete against nothing but computer opponents. I’m not asking for a robust online experience, as this game would be greatly improved with the additional of a split-screen mode so that a few people can crowd around a single system. This game is screaming for that kind of multiplayer mode, especially with so little to do after beating the single-player content.

It also doesn’t help that the stage designs aren’t very distinct. Even with the addition of different color schemes and slight tweaks to the sideline, I found that the twenty stages all started to blur together after a while. I suspect a lot of this has to do with those pesky 90-degree turns, which have a bad habit of limiting the types of courses you can think up. It’s also a shame that there aren’t different weather conditions or times of the day.

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Speaking of the courses, I found that a few of them had real performance issues. Maybe it’s the perspective I’m using, but there were times when the course would lag behind the action and then catch up in a glitchy (and often distracting) way. These weren’t random problems, either, as the performance problem would happen at the same exact corners every single time. It could be that the game runs flawlessly in the default isometric view, but that’s a miserable way to play this game.

The fact that the worst way to play Formula Bit Racing is also the default is baffling. Why would anybody choose this over the much more playable third-person chase view, which allows you to not only see the upcoming turns, but also react to them? One of the very few things this game has going for it is that it doesn’t feel like all the other throwback racing games on the market, yet that element is buried away in the settings screen. It’s just one of the many dubious decisions made by 2Awesome Studio that brings the score down. But hey, at least it’s only five-dollars, right?