Neo Sprint – Review

Start your engines, we’re on the grid ready to race with Neo Sprint brought to us by Atari, the retro-inspired arcade remake of the Sprint series popular from the late 70’s and early 80’s which helped inspire a plethora of top-down and isometric racers for decades to come.
But is Atari’s new addition off to a winning start, or should it be retired to the pits.

Starting from the main menu, there’s plenty of options to choose from with single and multiplayer choices as well as a career comprised of multiple cups, quick races, building your own even or building your own track. The core game sits in the career mode, where you’ll work through three cups, each with 4 sections, each consisting of a small grand-prix which earns you a dual against the area’s main racer on their home track.

Tracks start off as pretty simple circular tracks but you’ll soon have narrower lanes, twisty corners and jumps to contend with which make things a little more difficult, it’s worth noting difficulty isn’t the biggest concern as you’ll generally take a race or two to get to grips with controls (and likely switch the camera system) and then especially the first two cups, you’ll probably progress without too many troubles winning most races on the default difficulty.

As you might expect, the actual racing is kept as simplistic as it’s retro namesake, with a button to accelerate, another to brake and then left and right to turn your car, there’s also a power-slide button, but you’ll generally want to avoid that outside of the highest difficulties as the risk-reward factor is more likley to throw you into the wall.
For some reason power-slides are only possible at speed and most of the time it’s just easier to coast or tap the brake to take corners in a safer way without risking your entire race. Sadly, the simplistic approach carries throughout, with basic menus, very little narration and nothing more than a handful of little cut-scenes for the starting grid, or podium when you inevvitably start to rack up the wins.

The main issue I encountered early on was the camera angle, you have a choice between the camera being centralised on the car you’re controlling or the default overview of the map, sadly even selecting intentionally bright and obnoxiously obvious colours still left cars hard to track especially if there’s much scenery around the track, maybe on a 72″ screen it might not be as bad, but even at the optimum viewing distance of 6ft to a bright 50″ 4K Qled TV left me crashing time and time again.

Switching to the camera centralised on the car was a different game and far, far easier to see and control, after this switch, I won 12 races in a row without any issues, which again points towards a slightly unbalanced difficulty and the wise choice of avoiding that handbrake button.
The next problem is multiplayer, which forces you to the awful overview camera to allow up to ten players to race together, sadly there’s no online play so you’ll be crowding around the screen, so you might need that 72″ TV after all.

Sticking with the single player mode, I found after each event you also unlock collectibles, these range from different colours and decals for the vehicles, but without an in-game currency you’re left relying on luck for anything remotely useful, those vehicle skins seem “alright”, but with all vehicles having their own stats, most people will find one mixture of accelration, braking and turning that works well and stick to that car, so you’ll feel the unlock is wasted when you keep opening decals for other cars.

There’s plenty of other unlocks such as scenery and track pieces, and even after hours of play, I was less than a few percent of total unlocks, which points towards having plenty to work through but also shows you’ll have to endure a lot of repetition and multiple playthroughs of the pretty bland career to even fill like any created tracks are even scratching the surface of what unlocks are available.

Sadly though, beside these cups and events, there’s not really much going on, you can search and download tracks created by other users, but there’s not much variation, once you’ve raced around a few over-complicated twisting tracks with as many jumps, turns and narrow lanes as possible, you’ve pretty much tried them all.

Finally, this brings us to the track builder, which is the one thing I might keep coming back to if I didn’t feel like it was such a chore unlocking stuff to use in it. You’re given an oddly shaped grid and can select various pieces of track and scenery and then once the circuit is complete, you’ll be free to test the track before saving and sharing.
While the item selection menus are a little convoluted there’s definitely some enjoyment in making the tracks, but the game never felt engaging enough to put any creations to use. One scenario might be having a few friends each build a track and then building a grand-prix to include each track to enjoy together, but you’re then tackling the pretty awful default camera for multiplayer which means any enjoyment is likely to stop soon after track creation ends.

Obviously with top-down racers it’s a genre that’s been popular for decades, so we’ve seen countless games jumping on board which means any quick look at the Xbox store will find various retro inspired racers but the few that immediately spring to mind are the Rock’n’Racing franchise and Mantis Burn Racing, both are not only considerably cheaper than the extortionate £20 price tag of Neo Sprint, but they’re in many ways better games too..

This leaves Neo Sprint stuck in the pits, there’s just not enough rewarding content to make it enjoyable or enough value elsewhere which leaves me really struggling to find a reason to recommend it.

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