The Mugen Fighters Guild - We see a nice return of Sci-Fi Racers in 2017 and I love it

As a 36 old gamer I grew up with the first Playstation and liked many of its arcade like racing games, especially the scify racers a la WipeOut, Rollcage, and the crazy Jet Moto. While a WipeOut compilation game is coming to PS4 this year, the genre was pretty dead for a long time and indie developers were and still are rarely embracing the type of games that were great during the 32-64bit era. At least 3d platformers like back in time might see a nice return with games like Yoka Laylee and A Hat in Time at least.

But back to the topic^^ It seems we are seeing a small shift on the focus of indie games now after the big waves of Metroidvanias and all kinds of platformers and games that seemed to be more about the artstyle than the gameplay and fun with it. Yeah..basically all three of the scyfi racers I mentioned were and are getting spiritual successors now by small developer studios. Reason enough for me to write a bit about it, since the games make Hoffmann more happy than he looks on his avatar sometimes.

Basically it started last year already with the Steam release of Redout last year in september. This game is called a spiritual successor of WipeOut and F-Zero by their Italian developer 34BigThings and after playing it I could agree to this bold statement. The Techno/House/Trance/Electro soundtrack is there and while there are no big names like The Prodigy in the tracklist, it is super fitting to such a game.

The action is fast and on the lower difficulties still faster than in similar leagues in WipeOut, all in all I think the game is a good portion more difficult since you have not only to care about a good position in the races but also to not demolish your shields.

tldr, it IS a spiritual WipeOut successor and a good one, totally worth the around 30 bucks and a steal during a sale when it is down to 20 or less. There is a demo available with one track too. http://store.steampowered.com/app/517710/

The next one I want to talk about is Acro Storm, a game that reminded me a bit at Jet Moto and Extreme G while it is still very different. The game was just released as early access for 5 bucks, its supposed to cost 20 when it is complete, the low price is basically a thank you for everyone who helps funding the game through buying the early access version.

I played the demo and well..it is really just a beta yet but a promising one. If the developers manage to fix the many bugs and add as many features like 12 characters with background stories for each of them we have another cool racer there that might be able to capture the spirit of the 32bit era scyfi racers. Like Redout, this game also has a demo already http://store.steampowered.com//app/546610

So we have a WipeOut and a Jet Moto replacement but one for Rollcage would be cool too, right? Just look at Grip which is on early acess since February last year. It looks awesome, sounds awesome and is in my opinion even more fun than Rollcage 1+2. My only grip with it is that it is still not complete. The developers from Caged Element Inc. want to include 12 cars and 16 tracks but the current version still has only 7 tracks, 4 cars. The developers fixed a ton of bugs, add more graphic details and effects, more game modes, music tracks and seem to improve the game every month. Its not like the development for that '90 arcade racer that got successfully kickstarted and their funders still wait for anything since years.
The planned release was March 2017 but I think it will be delayed to summer. As a pretty conservative gamer I wait for the full version before buying.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/396900/

All of the three are available on Steam and Redout and Grip are planned for PS4 and XB1.

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We see a nice return of Sci-Fi Racers in 2017 and I love it (Read 1732 times)

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