Better late than never: trying out Hotshot Racing
As a particular enthusiast of Japanese-style arcade racers — with the Ridge Racer series, Virtua Racing and OutRun 2 ranking among my favourites — I should have been all over Hotshot Racing when it first released, but for one reason or another I wasn’t. I think I was waiting for a physical release — which subsequently happened, but turned out to be one of those dumbass “fauxical” releases where you get a game box, but just a download code inside. Consequently, I think I was a bit mad at Hotshot Racing for a while, so I didn’t think about it much.
Well, during a browse through the eShop this morning I happened to notice that it was reduced to three quid (until Feb 18, 2022 — get in quick if you want it), so I thought now was as good a time as any to finally give it a go. And y’know what? It’s pretty great — with a couple of caveats.
Hotshot Racing is an arcade racer specifically inspired by ’90s classics. Its most obvious inspiration comes from its untextured, low-poly visual style, which is reminiscent of Sega’s classic Virtua Racing. But Sumo Digital’s involvement in its development means that it carries a fair amount of OutRun 2 DNA in there — Sumo Digital developed OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, the expanded version of OutRun 2 for home consoles — plus there’s a pretty strong emphasis on drift racing around corners, a la Ridge Racer. And yes, you may well notice that Hotshot Racing is indeed a racing game that combines elements of all my favourite arcade racers from years gone by. This is a good thing.
There are several ways to play Hotshot Racing. The main grand prix mode offers you five different championships to enter, each unfolding across four different tracks. Each championship can be played at three different difficulty levels, too, so there’s plenty to keep you busy for quite a while just in that mode.
The Single Race mode boasts a number of additional ways to play, too. The Arcade mode simply allows you a standard one-shot timers-and-checkpoints race, like a single round of one of the championships. Cops and Robbers is a competitive mode where the “Robber” players have to bank as much cash as possible from a dwindling supply by ramming into dollar sign icons around the track — and, of course, the cops have to stop them. Drive or Explode is a Speed-inspired race where you have to keep your speed above a certain threshold for the whole race or risk exploding. And Barrel Barrage lets you attempt to take out your opponents with exploding barrels.
All of these modes are built atop the same basic old-school timers-and-checkpoints style racing, so if you’ve never been a fan of racing against tight time limits, Hotshot Racing is probably not going to change your mind. The timer in question is reasonably lenient, however; even if you have a complete disaster of a crash partway through the race, you’re unlikely to run out of time unless you really make a hash of recovering.
This, however, brings us on to the opponents in Hotshot Racing. In a nice touch, the opponents not only have names, but also character models and personalities, the latter of which in particular is something that was typically absent from ’90s racers. The downside to the opponents — well, potential downside, depending on how you like to play, anyway — is that they are all very aggressive. You can expect pretty much every race to involve a large amount of trading paint — and some fairly ruthless rubberbanding also means that even if you think you have a good lead, you’re rarely safe for long.
Extreme rubberbanding is firmly in keeping with ’90s racers, of course, but there are times when it feels like Hotshot Racing just takes things a little too far when it’s combined with how aggressive the AI is. It’s alarmingly easy to be send flying sideways by a rival slamming into you, for example — and recovering from this is quite difficult if that sends you careening into a wall, as it does nine times out of ten.
If this happens early in a race, the rubberbanding thankfully means that you can catch up with your opponents as easily as they can catch up with you — but if it happens on one of the last corners of a race it can feel like you’ve been completely fucked over by the AI without any real opportunity to resist.
Thankfully, the AI is just as fond as screwing each other over as it is messing with you, so sometimes you can find yourself sailing past a pileup and taking the lead late in the race, too. Swings and roundabouts and all that — but it still feels like a bit of a problem when considering the games Hotshot Racing is trying to pay homage to.
One of the defining characteristics of classic racers like Virtua Racing, Ridge Racer and OutRun 2 was the fact that despite unfolding in 3D, it was actually quite hard to get turned around and end up facing the wrong direction in any of them. Crashes could be a setback, yes, but never as significantly as they sometimes are in Hotshot Racing. This is a little frustrating when the game gets everything else about the ’90s racing experience so, so right — the sense of speed, the dynamic scenery elements in the track, the overexcited announcer, the very “arcade gamey” audible cues; the rest of the game is an absolute delight.
Another issue which may frustrate Switch players specifically is the somewhat variable performance in the “busier” game modes on that platform’s version. This generally isn’t an issue in the grand prix and arcade modes, which maintain a pretty solid 60 frames per second throughout, but the Cops and Robbers mode in particular suffers from some pretty severe frame rate juddering.
This isn’t really something we should be seeing in a game with untextured low-poly environments — but given the game’s been out for a while now, I guess it is what it is at this point. It’s a shame, because the Cops and Robbers mode is a lot of fun, otherwise — you just have to put up with it being a noticeably inferior experience to the rest of the game!
Frustrations aside, though — and I’ll emphasise that your tolerance for such frustrations will likely be largely dependent on if you grew up with PS1 and PS2-era racing games in particular — Hotshot Racing is a fine addition to today’s lineup of modern arcade racers. It’s not so long ago that the arcade racer was considered to be a completely dead genre — but between a variety of very different takes on it that we’ve seen over the last few years, including this, Slipstream, Cruis’n Blast, Horizon Chase Turbo and Inertial Drift, it’s clear that it’s not just alive and well, but thriving.
Now, maybe just a few more races…
Hotshot Racing is available now for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC via Steam.
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