A very tight, very casual, bite-sized racing experience that's pretty fun to keep picking up and dropping after a few minutes. Each race is barely a few minutes long and the tracks are very short but it all hearkens back to an age of extremely simple racers and is very satisfying to fill with trophies. My one gripe is that the game constantly shoves popups in the main menu to events and other modes and it's not possible to turn them off.

This isn't a sim racer, an open-world arcade racer or anything very special but that's actually exactly what makes it special anyway

Top 50 Favorites: #12

The vibes are immaculate, best racing video game of all time. One of the few retro-inspired games that actually feels like it's trying to carve out its own unique legacy, as opposed to simply nostalgia-baiting and recycling genre tropes. Perfectly encapsulates that feeling of sticking your head out the window on a summer drive, feeling the breeze caress your face as you take in all the beautiful sights in front of you - nothing else existing outside of that moment. The gameplay loop is essentially just doing one thing, but you never want to stop doing that thing - not with such stupendous colors popping right off the screen (in many scenic interpretations of real-life locations). And boy is that soundtrack killer, or what? Controls are tight but not so tight that it's a cakewalk, this still relies on your skill and drive to succeed. Great with buddies, too. Saying this is truly something special would be an understatement - one of the most underrated games of the 20th century.

This game pays homage to the classic Top Gear games of the SNES era with a locked-in-center type of driving gameplay. The main focus of this game is the World Tour mode where you collect points by finishing races in the podium and collecting blue coins along each track. The more points you have, the more stages you will unlock as well as locked cars.

This game features a ton of tracks and unlockable cars giving a good replay value and a solid bang for your buck considering it took me over 10 hours to complete the World Tour mode. Controls are very accurate and there is also free DLC as well as paid DLC including a package paying tribute to the greatest autosport driver of all time, Ayrton Senna.

Most definitely more sizzle than steak but I still finished the "World Tour" with 100% gold so it was doing something right.

The art direction and overall style of Horizon Chase Turbo is far and away what it does best. It's a beautiful game full of color and design. It strikes a perfect balance of being its own modern style while still being a nostalgic throwback. All while avoiding going full 80s, 90s, synth, or whatever. It's really nice and really unique. The gameplay tries to do this too but it doesn't quite come together as well. It feels like an old arcade cabinet racer with all the drifting and frustrating collisions into the backs of cars or sign posts but then it's also insanely easy with scripted player favoring rubberbanding ever stage.

The only real challenge on the campaign mode("World Tour") is trying to collect all the blue coins every track. But even that you can kind of cheese by going slow lap one to make sure you get them. You can do this because you'll be pulled to the leader in the following laps. There's a wide variety of cars with only one real difference. If you focus on cars and upgrades with the highest steering the rest of the cars' stats are irrelevant. The track layouts also get progressively lazier as you get to each new location. The art and design stays good mind you. But the layouts, whether through player familiarity or design laziness, just get boring. It opens with tracks clearly inspired by real world racing and video game fandom and devolves into repeated gimmicks and lazy left/rights. The music is decent but I turned it off quickly as it got too repetitive even in the small doses.

But where it works is the drop in and play aspect. Races are rarely longer than two or three minutes. The game runs full blast on the Steam Deck. It's just one of those games you can get in and out of. Load it up, cruise to victory, feel a false sense of accomplishment as the gold "Super Trophy" flashes on screen, rinse and repeat a couple times, shut down, and go on with your day. That said, once I completed the campaign, I had no desire to check out any of the other fluff. The racing product simply isn't good enough for me to want to do "Adventures" or "Endurance". I got what fun I could out of it. I will note that the menus got randomly unresponsive for me at times. Hangs or something. Especially after unlocking a vehicle. Might've been a Steam Deck thing. But otherwise runs flawlessly.

It looks great and is just passable enough fun to drive. Great on the Steam Deck.

[copied from my Steam review]

Gameplay - 9
Trilha Sonora - 10
Gráficos - 9
História/Campanha - 9

Nota - 9.25