Game Review: Steel Racer (PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, XBox)

If, like me, you owned an Amiga back in the 1990s you’ll remember the Lotus series of racing games from Gremlin Graphics. These set the standard for sprite based racers on the system, offering incredible speed, depth, and playability and are still remembered fondly today. Rightly regarded as classics,they inspired countless other games, and it’s clear that the latest release from indie publisher Ratalaika Games, Steel Racer is one of them…

Steel Racer – An Overview

Ratalaika describe the game as an old-school racer, taking its cue from 80s and 90s arcade favourites. Instead of opting for a 3D game engine, all of the cars and trackside objects use 2D sprites giving it a distinctly 16-bit look and feel. So for those like myself old enough to have played the aforementioned Lotus games, we’ll feel right at home straight away!

Steel Racer features a massive 50 different tracks of increasing difficulty, each split into a number of laps. These are broken down into five areas, each with its own visual style and landscapes. There’s no time limit but you’re up against 19 other AI controlled cars, so it’s a race for top position on each track.

Game Progression

Steel Racer starts you off in an oversized garage. You control a character who you can control walking around (who bears a passing resemblance to The Stig from Top Gear). There are a series of doors and behind each is a track and standing in front of these will display a map of the track, your best lap and overall time, and how many laps the track is. If you’ve completed it there’s also a trophy above it showing your best position. To race, just push up to go in.

Races themselves are straightforward enough, putting you in a field of 20 having to make your way to the front. You have a limited number of nitro boosts at your disposal (extras can be picked up as you drive), and scattered on the track are cash and speed boost pickups to help as well. At the end of the race, you get a bonus cash reward depending on your final position.

This cash can be used in the shops that can be found at various locations in the garage. Each shop has three items that can be purchased to upgrade your car, ranging from new paint jobs, increased nitro capacity and other enhancements. As you complete the tracks, new areas will be unlocked giving you access to more shops and more goodies to purchase.

Amiga Revisited?

I mentioned the Amiga at the beginning for good reason. While this isn’t a port of an existing Amiga game, and Ratalaika cite arcade racers as their inspiration, it’s clear after playing for just a few minutes that there’s a lot love for the Amiga amongst the developers. The music certainly bears similarity to countless tracks we’ve heard over the years from Commodore’s 16-bit powerhouse. Many of the instruments used in the soundtrack for Steel Racer will be instantly recognisable. Whether this was intentional or not, I don’t know, but it adds an authentic retro feel that I haven’t heard before in a game like this.

The visuals work on the same level. There are only a limited number of frames of animation on the main car. While this may take some getting used to for many, again this echoes the same look that we saw on most, if not all Amiga racing games back in the 90s.

And to add that final touch, the controls function in exactly the same way – no precision analogue movement here – it’s all digital, regardless of whether you use the d-pad or analogue stick. Many may feel that this limits the game or is restrictive, but for a retro styled racer, it completes the authenticity of the experience. It’s not for everyone, but for someone like myself who is the obvious target market for the game, it works like a dream.

Playability

When it comes to the gameplay, Steel Racer is incredibly addictive and has that elusive “one more go” factor and will keep you hooked, and have you determined to not only finish all the tracks in first place but complete the game. Certainly I found it hard to put down but it wasn’t without a few quirks.

As I just stated, while in the garage you can choose what tracks to race on in each of the game’s five stages. However, these can be selected in any order. While this gives you complete freedom to play the game how you want to, it also affects the way the game flows. Stages are unlocked by winning the 10th race and while these are only available if you have earned a set number of first place trophies, it is possible to “finish” the game without winning or even attempting every track. I would have preferred the game to have required the need to play them in order, then allowing a free play element for each completed stage.

Fun But Flawed

As much as I really enjoyed playing Steel Racer, it does have its issues. Your car itself seems to be pretty much indestructible. Collision with any other vehicle just slows you down slightly (unless you’re hit from behind and then you’re nudged forward, just like the Lotus series). However, going off the edge of the track does nothing apart from reduces your speed. You’re able to drive straight through the trackside barriers with no consequences at all.

Secondly, although there’s plenty of information on screen for the player, there’s no map so you have no idea of your position on the course relative to the other cars or the finish line. That may seem like I’m being picky, but this has been a standard feature in most arcade racers for decades.

Finally, I found the game to be too easy. I completed the game with ease on the normal setting within a few hours (which I’ll come onto shortly), and never came lower than first place in any race. Changing the difficulty setting to hard made no difference. Maybe my experience with the old Amiga racers and familiarity with the controls helped, but surely it can’t have given me that much of an advantage?

Trophy Trauma

I played the PS5 version of this and while I know I’ve said this before about games that trophies generally don’t bother me, this is something I felt was important to mention here. There are people who buy lower priced indie titles if trophies (or achievements for XBox gamers) are easy to obtain. And this was certainly the case with Steel Racer. On the PS5 version, I managed to get all of the trophies in just over 2 hours playing at a fairly casual pace.

But the trophies themselves did leave me somewhat bemused. Despite having 50 tracks, I only needed to complete and come first on 30 of them to get every trophy and obtain the all-important platinum trophy. With I would have thought that they would have been harder to unlock everything, adding increased longevity to the game.

Game Over?

Beyond the trophies, I managed to complete the whole game – all 50 tracks – in three and a half hours. After that point you’re awarded a championship trophy which unlocks one final area you can enter. Before going into here I thought that I was going to discover a new set of tracks to race on, but instead found an area with a congratulatory message from the developers, some bonus cash and an upgrade to your car’s nitro capabilities.

At first this felt like an anti-climax to the whole game, but thinking it through it actually added a new layer of replayability. While you’d been able to continually upgrade your car during play (and go back to beat your times on previous tracks if you wanted to), this new upgrade allowed the player to go back and do the same again giving each of the 50 tracks an extra lease of life.

Truthfully, if you wanted to extend the life of the game you could go back to each track every time you get a new upgrade but that depends on how fast you want to complete the game first time around.

Overall

Despite the relative ease and brevity of the core game, Steel Racer still proved to be a fun few hours of solid retro entertainment. With the nitro upgrade, the replayability is there for at least one more playthrough to try and beat all my previous times, probably giving it about 5-6 hours of total play time in total. And for a budget price of £4.99 – roughly the price of a Big Mac – you can’t really go wrong!

The copy of Steel Racer used for this review was kindly provided by Ratalaika Games.

About Simon Plumbe 223 Articles
Husband, father and lifelong geek. Originally from the West Midlands, now spending my days in South Wales with my family and a house full of animals. Passionate about video games, especially retro gaming, the Commodore 64 and PlayStation Vita. Love pro wrestling, sci-fi and I'm an animal lover and vegetarian. Enjoyed this and my other articles? Why not buy me a coffee: http://ko-fi.com/simonplumbe

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