At first glance, Horizon Chase Turbo looks like a fake video game, the sort of thing you'd see a character play in a TV show for a few seconds. The extremely clean models, bright environments, and smooth animation just give it this uncanny quality that doesn't quite gel with what your expectation of a real playable video game product is. When you're sitting down to play it yourself, however, you'll realize that this art style wasn't just created to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the classic arcade racers Horizon emulates, but to help you enter a sorta of zen-like state, making it easier to anticipate curves to swerve around rivals. I put a ridiculous amount of time into this one, and almost all of it was spent in a sort of trance.

Horizon Chase Turbo is broken up into several modes, but the main attraction is the World Tour, which is features 12 countries with three circuits each, plus an "upgrade race" which you can complete to increase the stats of your cars. Tracks are littered with medals, and collecting them all while placing first will earn you a "super trophy." Collecting all the super trophies in a circuit will unlock a bonus car, and each car you unlock gets its own little adventure mode consisting of five races. This is in addition to a tournament mode, which itself is divided into three tiers with multiple circuits each, and an endurance mode which I did not check out because there's already too much game and I was getting burnt the hell out. Seriously, I can't think of the last time I got this much game for like, five dollars. There's a reason I marked this as "played" and not "completed," because I just don't have it in me to spend another 20 hours with this thing trying to soak up the rest of its content. Doing so would only make me hate it.

I can, however, see myself coming back to this in spurts. The core gameplay is pretty solid as far as classic arcade racers go. Going back to something like this, my biggest hurdle was unlearning my compulsion to drift and instead lean in to curves. Overtaking opponents is all about developing a familiarity with the course and your vehicle and knowing when to hug a turn or apply a boost. Each car feels like it has its own strengths and weaknesses, which encouraged me to actually play with quite a few of the vehicles in my garage. A number of them are modeled after famous cars from movies, games, and other media. The car from Initial D is here, you can unlock the 1980s Batmobile, for a couple bucks you can get the convertible from OutRun. Of course we all know that's what they are, but due to international copyright laws... they aren't.

Unfortunately, a lot of the good will Horizon earns in its opening hours is burned by an extremely frustrating middle game. It seems that as the team stretched for content they lost sight of what made tracks fun to race on, opting to increase the difficulty with blind turns and weather effects designed to obstruct your visibility. There's a few tracks where it's almost impossible to tell where the road is, and of course they're riddled with hairpin turns. Each race has twenty cars (including yourself) and you always start at the back of the pack. You can get an initial boost if you rev up at the right time, but this will often just send you banging into someone's bumper, which causes you to then slow down and them to speed up. Naturally, the AI is also tweaked to become more difficult, but only in the sense that they start to swerve to cut you off more often, and they accomplish this through some very obvious rubber-banding. I can't count the amount of times I approached a rival only to see them snap across the track unnaturally to prevent me from overtaking them. It all ends up feeling incredibly cheap and irritating.

And yet, the difficulty pacing is so off that the hardest stretch of game is smack dab in the middle. Once you beat Dubai it's pretty smooth sailing until the last circuit in Hawaii. I have no idea how this game looked in 2018, but simply playing it in this state made me wonder if each country was released one by one as free updates. It would at least explain how inconsistent it feels.

Despite how uneven the game can be, I still had a good time with it. Again, I got this for like, five bucks. It's hard to be too mad about it at that price. Definitely pick this one up if you're a fan of old school racing games, but also wait to do so until it's on sale.