Horizon Chase Turbo is a love letter to early 90s racing games. Developed by Brazilian team Aquiris, it sets out to be a spiritual successor to the SNES Top Gear games, which were and still are extremely popular in the country — as someone who did grow up with Top Gear 3000 (the third game in the series), I can say with confidence it succeeded with flying colors.

The main campaign, World Tour, takes the player through 12 locations, each with about 12 tracks, plus an extra race that allows the player to choose an upgrade for their vehicles. As mentioned above, the main goal of this game is to replicate the Top Gear style of racing: you don’t really have much liberty in where you drive along the track; you accelerate, brake, and steer to overtake opponents and cut corners. Additionally, there are no shortcuts whatsoever. It’s very simple, but engaging.

Track design is simple. Tracks go left, right, up and down. It doesn’t have the ramps and warp pads introduced in Top Gear 3000, and obstacles in the tracks themselves are rare — you’ll lose more speed from bumping into another car 99% of the time. Most of the races are pretty short, although some (particularly in the India and Japan stages) can be decently long. Winning nets you points, which unlock more cars (as well as the final set of races, Kilauea). More points can be obtained by collecting coins during races; collecting all of them and then getting first place nets the player a Super Trophy.

Finally, unlike the first two Top Gear games which have pit stops, Horizon Chase Turbo has gas canisters you collect along the track — you can run out of fuel during a race. It also does away with the damage system all three SNES Top Gear games had; if you crash, you aren’t penalized aside from the speed loss.

The player progressively unlocks cars as they play the game. Each car has a unique stat lineup, so the player can choose whichever playstyle they prefer. Most of the cars are obviously modeled after real-life cars, although some are parodies of fictional vehicles, such as the AE86 from Initial D. Additionally, each car has a unique set of dialogue, which can be triggered during races; this is a feature present in the first two Top Gear games, and, while it doesn’t present any advantage whatsoever, helps give each car a bit more personality.

The AI can be pretty unforgiving. It was not uncommon for the first place CPU to randomly pull out a nitro when I finally manage to approach it, or move to block me when I manage to utilize my own nitro — while very frustrating initially, it did force me to use new strategies for each race, and after a while, I could consistently score Super Trophies with not that much difficulty. In other words, I developed my own racing style, and it felt absurdly satisfying to see it pay off.

It’s worth mentioning the soundtrack. It was composed by Barry Leitch, the composer for the Top Gear games, and, as far as I can tell, was his first soundtrack in over a decade. Personally, I think it excels at capturing the feel of the SNES games’ soundtracks, and helps make the fast-paced tracks more exillarating. There are also a few remixes of the main theme from the first Top Gear, which is a nice touch.

The game also boasts a few side modes; the Playground presents five races with unique conditions, and these races are split into “seasons,” as well as an Endurance mode, where the player must race through a random number of tracks; the number increases depending on difficulty.

There are also Tournaments, which, as the name suggests, has the player racing in four tracks, with their score tallied by the end — while a good mode, there are far too many tournaments to complete, and, unlike in Mario Kart, completing a tournament in a higher difficulty doesn’t mark it as completed for lower ones, meaning that for some tournaments (lower difficulties have less tournaments), they must be repeated at least three times. I’m of the opinion this game mode needed to have some fat cut.

Lastly, the game has received a few DLC campaigns, with more on the way. I have not played the Senna Forever campaign (a tribute to Brazilian F1 legend Ayrton Senna) yet, so I cannot comment on it (I will update this review with it once I play and finish it), but I have tried the other two DLC campaigns; the Rookie Series campaign is a shorter, easier version of the main campaign, with less tracks, opponents and with the fuel mechanic removed, while Summer Vibes includes the Breeze car (an homage to OutRun) and 12 reskinned tracks to add a tropical theme. It’s just okay — the car is decently overpowered, and the reskinned tracks add pretty much nothing, but at least it’s only 2 USD.

All in all, Horizon Chase Turbo is an excellent revival of the early 90s style of racing games. It’s vibrant, fast, boasts a good variety of vehicles and race tracks, and while very simplistic at its core, the arcade-like design makes it very engaging; I have frankly very little to complain about with this game, aside from some weird balancing in the latter half of the game. While I may be a bit blinded by nostalgia from growing up with one of the games it’s a tribute to, I ultimately believe Horizon Chase Turbo is an absolute must-play for fans of retro racers — it succeeds at everything it tries to do.

What started off as a cool Outrun-style arcade racer with gorgeous retro graphics incredibly quickly turned into a tedious and frustrating experience with cheap AI and lackluster track design. The game is designed to replay tracks over and over again until you basically perform a flawless race. There is no catching up to the leader if you bump into another car or the scenery (which is sometimes on the track!). The other racers go out of their way so that you bump into them and sometimes they'll just appear out of nowhere when you're coming out of a tight corner or on a downhill part of the track. And there's 19 opponents in every race.

And you HAVE to replay races to get better results because progress is otherwise locked. I unlocked several cars and upgrades and none of them improved my performance in any way. The cars all drive the same and the upgrades are worthless, from what I can tell. Also, you can run out of fuel! Your car just slows down and stops on the track. And that's it.

Horizon Chase Turbo is a prime example of why arcades sucked and why that cheap-ass model died a horrible, deserving death.

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.