Official Score
Overall - 20%
20%
Rhythm Race makes an attempt to combine the racing and rhythm genres, but the end result is a disjointed mess. The control scheme is far too awkward and overdeveloped for its own good, and the whole package feels broken at a fundamental level.
Players will be able to feel the rhythm of the night with BlueFront’s new title Rhythm Race. A racing game where you don’t take the wheel, does its music-based antics help it cross the finish line?
Rhythm Race Review
Though this title might look like a traditional racer (albeit one with a stylish dayglo 80s neon aesthetic), the controls of Rhythm Race are a bit different than the norm. Rather than control the steering and the acceleration of their ride, players will instead control their aura. Mapped to the QWERT keys, players will be able to choose between purple, blue, green, white, and yellow colors as they race along.
The key to victory is to make sure your aura matches the same color as the upcoming bars of light on the track. Match them up and you’ll be able to increase your multiplayer and go faster. Get it wrong, however, and players will lose out on however much multiplier they have saved up and slow down. There’s also circles on the ground that need both the aura and the space bar to match for it to register.
Sounds simple right? It is…to an extent.
By limiting the amount of interaction players have to a color and five keys sounds simple enough, but figuring out what color corresponds to what button is a recipe for disaster. Even on the normal difficulty setting we were fumbling along every step of the way. It’s not like the two color scheme of Ikaruga or even the three color scheme of Pawarumi; there’s simply far too much to keep track of at any given time. It also doesn’t help that the aura of your car is positively tiny; even at full screen we were often unable to make it out amidst the other cars.
To add insult to injury, projecting the wrong aura causes a nasty dissonant sound to come about. When a game is unpleasant to play, you just know that you’ve got something that is less than stellar. The space bar sections aren’t much better, with it feeling clumsy and counterintuitive. Put simply, it shouldn’t have been included to begin with.
The short song list, which consists of such oddball names as “Husky Frog,” “Rhythmic Clapping,” and “Calm Owl” are about as interesting as you would expect with names like that. The synth beats are decent enough, but it doesn’t leave a lasting impression and falls far shorter than established artists like Com Truise.
Other than that, there’s not much to this package. Achievements are MIA, and outside of gunning for the maximum amount of notes hit and notes streaks, there’s little incentive to truly master this package.
Rhythm Race makes an attempt to combine the racing and rhythm genres, but the end result is a disjointed mess. The control scheme is far too awkward and overdeveloped for its own good, and the whole package feels broken at a fundamental level.
