I have been plying SRB2Kart near the time it came out and have my own server (Becky House hiii) and have been observing whatever I can of Ring Racers secret Frankenstien’s lab development so I make this review from a place of passion and dissatisfaction I guess

I don’t know my exact hours but i’ve played basically as soon as I got up to now as i’m typing this so it has to be at least near or over 10 hours. Also no stars since I don’t think this is a game that can be rates by stars.

Its interesting to me. The game is so ambitious yet so aimless, so ready to give you accessibility options but also takes away options that were in the first game . This game is so so so so much but so valid at the same time.

There’s so many mechanics. You can drop down in the air now, you collect rings to go fast. if you have a ring item it can overcharge you and make you have a speed boost for awhile AND you use rings to go faster on slopes (I hate this but more on that later), new items like 200+ stages (including the bonus ones), a fucking spindash, and a tail whip that you can use when you have zero rings.

All of this sounds kinda cool right? Well actually the way they are implemented sucks so bad. Firstly, the drop. You think it’d useful because of V1 air time problem but holy fuck it has a bounce (and i tested you can literally bounce forever if you time it right) and the bounce does so much harm than good. Half the time I make the right choice and use it to land I bounce and if the stage has a lit or a part with no rails, I bounce off and have to wait to respawn. and its like LOL whats the point in that mechanic.

Speaking of useless mechanics lets talk about spin dashing and shortcuts because they go in tandem because they invented a new problem for themselves to solve because of the spindash. You hold down the. button and charge a spindash basically you know sonic shit. The only problem is that it halts your momentum and with a game all about that it is hard to justify using it. you typically use it for the starting linefor a start boost, which is now like sonic riders one except bad cause you can completely die during it and it last so long already so if some bullshit happens to you have fun waiting like 10-20 seconds of just not playing the game. because of the start line change, you NOW charge the spindash and let go at the right time for the boost which is kinda ok but the spindash also has no cancel so sometimes I fuck the timing up by a second and try to fix it and remember “oh yeah this propels me forward now” and i’m dead. I think a cancel and a little faster charging time is the true say to make it worse hell you lose rings anyways for holding it too long so lol.

An even more sorta useless mechanic is the tailspin which you can do when you have 0 rings. on paper sounds sick but this game is alll about those fucking rings. if you have less than 20 you just go slower than ofher people, if they hit you when you have 0 or negative rings you tumble and man all i’ll say about the tumbling is that it is the most annoying and boring thing to have to sit througj after seeing bullshit. now that I explained the extra stuff of the ring mechanics you understand why this move kinda sucks. I feeel like you should be able to use it anytime for like a penalty of 2 rings, but because of the ring button making you faster so you can go on slope and they’re both mapped to one button, you have to WASTE. all of your rings, let go of the button, and THEN you can do it and it can like deflect jawz and stuff, but its so must risk for very specific situation it might as well not be in the damn game.

And I haven’t even talked about the stage bloat really or how the stages are kinda either under designed or overly design (play green hills in v1 and then play it in ring racers lol). I haven’t talked about how they lock online and even addons through a kirby air ride smash checklist box, hell they even make you search for colors in the damn game you don’t even get the right to have all the fucking colors. You have to play like so many hours just to be able to play as some of the characters fuck you have to do mystic melody sonic adventure 2 shrines to get some of these characters its just ridiculous I feel it feels like the devs heard people talking shit about the former single player and got so mad they fucking put too much single player i can’t believe i’m saying that man.

I haven’t even mentioned the fucking long patronizing tutorials that does not teach you any cool new mechanics or how the items work but they teach you how to fucking drift and like yeah thats nice for new comers (if this game was actually beginner friendly) but like the fact you have to do a race and shit just to skip it no button is ridiculous.

The game is ridiculous it feels like you have to play it in a specific ways or the devs will spit on you basically in way. It just feels spiteful in a way I don’t know maybe if the game updates and mod support flourishes it will be fine but the stages are overly designed, items feel like they got overly nerfed or they’re way way way too good, you get hit snd tumble so often it just kills your whole momentum for the race, and i’m tired and kinda want to make an actual video for this so i’m gonna end the review here for now but fuck. I’m just decently disappointed because from what I played there is a fun good game in this genuinely I just wish it didn’t come with a overly bloated and daunting bad game.

Virtua Fighter is one of my favorite game series ever. Sonic The Fighters is one of my favorite games ever. This is just the bridge between. A lot of cool fundamental shit akin to Sonic but a lot of the advance shit you're able to do like Virtua Fighter make this game very fun to learn and hard to put down. My girlfriend wants to play more fighters with me and she was able to pick up and learn this one pretty quickly and I was able to watch her learn and grow in a fighter in a pretty dope way. The armor breaking mechanic is also very smart and makes you think before vice versa of being the armor breaky or the armor breaker. You lose more health but also do more damage so it becomes of mind game of whiff punishing or grabbing when you reallllly need to.

I only dock off points for the final boss. He already is advance ai you don't have to make his attacks do 292838238 damage too!

One of the first games I got REALLLLLY good at was Punch Out for the Wii. I was obsessed with the game it was all me and my cousin would play often. I still play it often enough to remember like 80% of the trick by the exact frame I have to do them on. Punch Out is still one of the best games I ever played for the factor that you can easily find out the tricks or learn them by chance because of its intuitive game design. If you can see an opening there is a 90% chance you can do it, even if the trick is hard at first.

I cannot say this about Thunder Ray. Thunder Ray has a lot of good things. The movement is ok, the impacts can feel grand, and the art, well that's what most people seem to see, the art. Its pretty fucking good. Lord Worw and the Mr Mxyzptlk ass mother fucker were A1 designs. But is the game fun???? No. I sadly have to say very recently that a lot of games of been playing are almost all style no substance.

Firstly, this game has no counters. Which is a staple in like, every Punch Out game. All you can do is really dodge and sometimes with enough Punches they MAY be stunned (only say this with Evil Rico and i'm not even gonna count the Witch cause like cmon lol) Point is, its not really what its sup[posed to be a successor of in fact its something much more boring and sad than saying "its the worst game ever!", its just boring. Its so boring. Its an endurance test. You remember all their patterns and then hope the rng of where they're gonna block doesn't fuck you too bad and also hope that they aren't going to add 8 million pieces of bullshit that the boss could do.

Remember Dragon Chan? And how at first him jumping and doing kicks is like HOLY FUCK THATS WEIRD THATS SCARY but after doing it you feel like a beast for learning these new things. Or how Sandman adds new attacks and yeah they're annoying but also its intuitive they show you what they're gonna do, the game looks pleasant to look at so you know, and hell you can COUNTER them and when you dodge you are rewarded with a chance to wail on them and just beat the ever dog shit out of them.

Sorry back to talking about how Thunder Ray has the "the enemy does more shit" thing but. Nothing else. You don't get rewarded for dodging, I guess because you get a super meter instead I guess they thought counters were worthless cause of no star punches, there is no stamina even, and not even a fucking real timer there are no intermissions it is just you standing there until you fucking brute force yourself into winning eventually. And thats kinda lame LOL.

Like sorry but the fact that enemies can just eat your fucking super whenever they please it seems, the fact that there no intermission so the risk of TKO on you is always there, and hell whoever said to add that stupid fucking black and white shit should get jumped like actually.

Sorry let me explain, so when you lose a lot of health the screen zooms in and your vision goes completely black and white which is deranged like just the bosses in this fucking game who are super aliens get rewarded by beating you up more than YOU get rewarded for doing anything. Like especially when you have moves that aren't as choreographed, the fucking witch boss having COLOR CODED ATTACKS that you cannot see and the fact that two punches from theres fucker deletes your health, the black and white shit is not cool its not interesting it just sucks dick.

Look, there is a lot of passion in this game a shit ton, but also i'm sick of shit just looking nice and then just not. Being fun.

I have very complex feelings about this game. Probably the most complex feeling about a piece of art I had in a long time. I've been excited about this game ever since it got announced when I was around 19 - 20 (ironically enough I thought it was announced when I was around 17 and with this revelation it made my feelings even more complex) and now i'm 23 almost 24 in around half a year. A lot of things changed in the last 3-4 years and some stay the same.

One constant was that I was very excited for this game. Um Jammer Lammy and the original Jet Set Radio on dreamcast were some of the most formative point of my early childhood/teen years. I remember when the PS3 port came out and it gave me another chance at JSR when I was 12 since my Dreamcast was turbo dead. It is one of my favorite games ever made, hell this VERY game made me play all the way through the story again with my friends and gfs and I loved it.

This game is hard to talk about because it makes me think about other things and then I go on tangents about those things. Because this things where's its inspiration not only on its sleeves but its forehead and maybe even a tramp stamp so its inspiration can see it and get super horny and fuck it in the butt lol sorry.

My point is, this game doesn't KNOW what it wants to be. Its it own thing but also it isn't, its Jet Set Radio Future but it isn't, its a Tony Hawk game but it isn't, its fucking Grand Theft Auto but also it isn't. Now I'm not saying I want this game to perfectly ape these games at that point I'd just fucking play em instead, what I am saying is that it kinda is copying what these games did and trying to put a spin on them and with some it succeeds. Like its character design and aesthetic.

This game looks dope. If you put Red in JSR (mainly Future) I would not bat an eye. Its style is dope, when I unlocked one of the main spoiler character I was omega hyped cause I liked their design a shit ton its sick. The cities are nice too they look cool especially the oil rig area of the game it was sick I thought.

But also that pays to its detriment. It's failures. A great example is that very oil rig level. I liked how it looks, but a huge problem with a giant problem I have with these maps (especially since the fucking mini map in this game is the worst i've seen in ANY game) these maps are not intuitive. Navigating these maps are hell and while playing that very oil rig I literally said "Man this is just the oil rig from Underground but bad lol" and I don't want to think that but that's honestly most of this game.

This game has graffiti QTE but bad its even more vapid than JSRF just pressing a button and spraying. This game fixes the handling of JSR but still at times feels annoying and with the camera fucking going bananas sometimes its just as hard if not sometimes harder navigating this game than even the original JSR.

This game has GTA stars, but bad. This game tried to do what JSRF did with dealing with the pigs (cops) but the problem is with this is that they did not fix the fundamental problem of the combat of JSRF. Its still boring, you just mash buttons, the enemies have almost no variety besides sometimes they have a shield and sometimes they're a big robot or they try sniping you and at the end of the day you can ignore them for the whole game. Hell, if you're going to do combos and shit you HAVE to because even dealing with them breaks your combo and its so boring! The only saving grace is the mods and that someone made it so fighting them didn't stop your combo and multiplier which made the game 2Xs more fun LOL.

The enemies just don't have what the golden rhino had and it shows all the enemies were so samey and all the bosses were so samey besides like one and its only because you didn't tag em. Oh yeah this game is also Tony Hawk but bad. The combo system in this game is probably one of the most boring things in a game ever. All you do is hit corners and billboards and maybe a halfpipe if its there for multiplayer and then mash buttons for tricks. To my knowledge there aren't really any cool complex tricks that can be done besides boosting and doing a trick and look I don't mind people liking simple games its ok but the fact that this game looked at two games meant to be arcadey and made them so simple and boring (hell even doing a manual is just holding a button) is so lame.

This entire game is kinda just eye candy, a world I would go to in VR Chat like I'd chill and smoke in it but Its not something engaging to me. Hell even the music is just shit i'd put on a road trip just to sleep if i'm the passenger. They aren't bad but since this game isn't like JSR and doesn't diversify with levels often the same song will play like 100000 times and the only time you can really change it now is with either a music mod (pc only for now lol) and unlocking the song mixes which is like. why????

Anyways I guess my point is, is that this game gets boring fast. Its too samey. All you do is meet a new gang, tag their tags, do combo challenges or platforming challenges, do a BIG combo challenge, and then do a Mario Sunshine level, rinse repeat. And yeah there are unlockables but when even the characters are essentially just skins with like 4 voice lines, it just feels so. Vapid. Superficial.

And I hate to say that. I'm kinda a big team reptile shooter. I bought like 8 people Lethal League Blaze, I used to bring it on campus for my friends to play, I OWNED the original Lethal League, and yeah its a different game but with how that game has such diverse characters with different gameplay and hell Switch and Jet being 5 dollars fucking dlc in Bombrush, its a little sad when every characters have the same stats. The same gameplay. The same. Everything.

Look I got a super autism brain, you can tell how much I fucking typed here, but I guess i'm just sad because of what this game could of been. And its not even bad I guess its just not for me. If you're a Jet Set Radio outsider looking in, you'll like it, if you're someone into games where you don't have to fully think and its easy to sink your teeth into, this is for you, if you liked JSRF, well this may be the closet thing you have to some sort of sequel pc port. I guess to gist of it is for me is that I kinda wanted a game that was a mix of the two. and I got something that was a mix of a bunch of things I REALLY like but because of scope, size of team, and time couldn't fully get there. Hell they updated the game and added a minigame to the phone so I feel me saying "it could of cooked more" is true! Especially since its 40 bucks which is even more than Hi Fi Rush and of course they need the money but 40 bucks + 5 for essentially skins and 15 bucks for the OST is something i'd expect the Bethesda Tango Gamework game to do and not the dope azz indie product.

TLDR: I had some fun playing it especially using the mods today. But I just wish it was more complex, I wish it was as compassionate as the art, the character design, the architecture!

I don't want just Jet Set Radio, but thats what I got kinda but all the aspects I hated amplified sorta. And I guess I wanted to vent

No Star Rating cause its not fair since i'm gonna use mods, see updates (especially if there is a momentum mod since this game didn't have that and the only ways to go faster besides boosting is doing tricks and doing multiplier shit which is also something that drives me off the wall), and maybe even speedrun it since it has pretty cool tech.

Give it a chance you'll like it probably but I wanted to give I guess another perspective on this game.

I guess I want to put a review of the first and second together as, plot wise as well, they are a complementary piece. These two games are hard to explain for people who do not go through what the main character has.

I'm not saying "oh you can't understand the true nature of this game" but I feel a lot of people have or will play these games and truly not fully relate/understand with her problems and thoughts. There was many times in both these games where I had the exact same coping mechanisms and thought processes as the main character. Hell even the "player character"s voice is honestly my inner monologue doing shit in my day to day life.

Me and the main characters experiences are different in many ways but in a lot of regards the way we cope with pain, with the things that happen to us, with abuse, are very similar. Like as someone who is autistic, the way her story trail off constantly, how she repeats the same things, how she imagines her thoughts as other people and living things, the way she interacts with unrestricted access to her laptop, and how she sees her own mother are very reminisces to things that I do and how I interact with the world. I think these games can be a good lesson on how to see mentally ill people and how to not say certain things to them, and how to be patient and understanding with them. Overall very good and I think people should give this game a chance!