With the success of their work on the Sonic All-Star Racing series, Sumo Digital has amassed a well of notoriety over the years. deservingly so as well, the All-Star Racing linage is representative of the apex of the kart racer genre-- not yet has another kart racer struck that same perfect harmony between pure, unadulterated chaos and deterministic, mechanical soundness. Owing to this legacy, many eyes were on their 2020 release, Hotshot Racing. However, Sumo Digital swiftly dashed all theories of their latest project being even tangentially related to their more recent backlog beyond the fact it's a racer. No, Hotshot Racing was something far more daring than All-Star Racing-- it's a small-scale collaboration between newborn indie studio Lucky Mountain Games that aims to revive a subgenre long dormant.
Arcade racers, a subgenre left in the dust by the annals of time. A subgenre welded tight between the more realistic, simulation-esque racers and the fantastical, off-the-wall kart racers. Sumo Digital was looking towards the likes of Daytona USA, Hard Drivin', and Winning Run. Its poppy, non-textured graphics do more than enough work harkening back to its forefathers, but to further drive its ambitions home the game interweaves an "easy to learn, hard to master" philosophy into every fabric of its design. Hotshot Racing is far from being the first aspiring indie project seeking to feel a hibernating niche though, far from it. Routinely, these works fall into the pitfall of faintly imitating their forefathers on a superficial level but failing to grasp how any of their core components culminate to form a cohesive whole.
Hotshot Racing kicks it off on the right foot, as on a presentation level it exhibits a level of greater nuance. Instead of simply deriving from its inspirations, Hotshot Racing contemplates the limitation affronted to those games due to computer hardware and decidedly takes the next step. The game's art direction is simply an evolution of other vertex racers featuring a more realized, animated world. The backdrop of each track is extensively animated and the game has four distinct biomes to boot. While these biomes share many of the same assets, each one holds hosts to their own signature locale and sometimes even sport different color palettes. The racers themselves are more individualized, each bearing their own costumes, backstory, ending sequence, and car selection. For the most dedicated players, you can even personalize each of the game's twenty-four cars. In a genre that thrives on the players that dedicate hundreds of hours optimizing their times, superfluous side-content such as this ends ensuring this niche audience will have content to further engross themselves into the game's universe.
Nevertheless, these charming aesthetical additions are of little importance in comparison to mechanical depth when it comes to securing longevity. The centerpiece of the game is the drifting mechanic. Drifting has a weighty, yet tangible handling to it. The reward to it is high; gracefully turning a corner not only maintains your speed but also charges your ever-vital boost gauge. However, the slightest error in your handling can be utterly devastating. It's a simple yet potent dynamic that lends itself to intricate mechanical exploration. On top of that, you have Hotshot Racing's diverse car selection. Its assortment of vehicles forms this nice sense of player expression by throwing a barrage of intriguing, meaningful variables into the mix. Do you want a higher acceleration so you can swiftly speed the competition? Do you want a more accurate drift so you can cut turns with pinpoint precision? Do you want a heightened top speed so you can bolt through the track in style? Or, do you want a mix of everything even?
Such mechanical refinement is worthy of being appreciated and its subtlety is amplified by Hotshot Racing's twenty assorted racetracks. There are five Grand Prixs, each of them journeying through the game's previously mentioned biomes in addition to three different "difficulty levels". These "difficulty levels" are less so representative of how brutally the AI will outpace and more so an indicator of what CC you will be racing at. The higher the CC, the more calamitous the smallest errors are. The track layouts themselves are far from being bombastic, but the delicate touch of Hotshot Racing's drifting mechanic keeps them feeling diversified. These courses act as a test of overall mechanical mastery, with each one slightly remixing itself in favor of one specific skill to spice things up. It gives the entire game this holistic feeling, and by extension further highlights player individuality. I adore how adamant Hotshot Racing is about being a laser-focused, expressive racing experience... which is why I find it astronomically disappointing how the game's balancing can't keep up with its diversity whatsoever.
The Time Trial leaderboard is dominated by a band of three cars out of an array of twenty-four. To be frank, it's terribly demoralizing to see all the time one invested cultivating their playstyle be thrown to the wayside due to unjust balancing. It would be disingenuous to say that these balancing issues are prominent on a casual level, I cleared each of the Grand Prixs on Expert before I even delve into Time Trial Mode. However, it cannot be understated how much this tipped scale spoils the game's longevity. When a majority of the roster pales in comparison to a small, select group of them, it accelerates the game's natural skill progression an unprecedented amount. When you're attempting to play to perfection, why explore the possibilities of the other vehicles that are ever so tremendously outclassed by their peers? It's no wonder the game has struggled to gain any semblance of a community, the game's solved. Only a small niche of players are going to dedicate the time to a racer to truly delve into this level of technicality, but considering the fact it's these same players that keep a game alive for years on end, it's devastating how shallow Hotshot Racing's skill pool is.
This leaves us with the game's aforementioned Grand Prixs and AIs, the latter of which holding host to their own bundle of issues and highlights yet another balancing issue. A common complaint with racers is their infamous rubber-banding AI, and I want to get it out and the way and say that is absolutely not the issue with the game. Rubber-banding AIs are cool, they lend way to a form of dynamic difficulty that gives racer this evergreen kind of content. What is a problem is how overtly aggressive they are. For some bizarre reason, the AI tends to hones into the player in an attempt to tailspin you. Mind you, going for a tailspin at Expert level speeds is a borderline infeasible task that yields high risk and little reward. Yet, the AI manages to accomplish the feat with pinpoint precision every single time they go for it. They not doing this as a desperate attempt to win the race, as doing a tailspin often causes you more speed than what it's worth-- no, they do it specifically to screw over you and only you. Even in Expert It's not impossible to come back from a tailspin, but that does not excuse how much it diminishes the value of skillful play. When you're only one unlucky tailspin away from losing all your progress, none of the race feels like it matters up till the very last lap.
Don't get me wrong however, these AI are still easily exploitable despite how much it seems like they hate you. There's a trick you can do to win every single Grand Prix with ease, and it applies to PvP races as well to an extent-- never get in first place. It is effectually impossible for the 1st-4th place AI to not be in close proximity of you as long as you're in the 2nd-4th place range yourself. So here's the gameplan: on the final lap, get into 2nd-4th place around the second half of the final lap. Then, right before the finish line, use the boost you accumulated to dash right past the competition. This works on every difficulty; the AI will never retaliate by boosting themselves, they will always surrender themselves and let you easily breeze past them. It doesn't even matter if you fail to accumulate the boost you need by drifting, by simply tailing behind another racer you build boost. This plays into 1st place being at disadvantage rather or not you're playing with the AI or your friends, slipstreaming is too strong of a comeback mechanic for genuine, skillful play to feel rewarded. This game's core racing is fundamentally broken to such an astonishing degree, the deeper I explored the game the more it felt like it was directly insulting me for trying to play to its expectations.
Once you've broken the Grand Prix Mode and gave up on the idea of competing in Time Trial, the game leaves you with a handful of additional casual modes. First, you have "Cops & Robbers", a mode in which you amass money by clearing checkpoints and ramming into other drivers. By virtue of this mode rewarding the same predatory aggression AIs exhibit in your standard race and the game's handling not being equipped to handle pinpoint aggression even halfway as well as the AI makes it out to be, this mode isn't all that fun. Then you have "Drive or Explode", a mode where you have to maintain a speed that is perpetually rising or, as the name says, you'll explode. Honestly it's by far the best mode the game has to offer; it stresses the game's fundamentals while lessening the value of obtaining first place. First place is still the chief victory condition, but the survivability aspect adds a real nice dynamic to it all. Finally, you have "Barrel Barrage", a mode where each racer is given a Mario Kart banana every time they pass a checkpoint. It's honestly not as chaotic as it sounds, you're still playing the same game and the AI isn't smart enough to strategically place barrels to begin with. Overall, outside of Drive or Explode, these modes are rather boring diversions at best and are far from being the fun, casual distractions they set out to be.
I've gathered a vast amount of respect for Sumo Digital over the years, so I admittedly went into Hotshot Racing with high hopes. While I initially considered the game a home-run, that initial high grew into confusion, and that confusion grew into frustration, and that frustration grew into apathy. Needless to say, Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital missed the mark. I dunno which studio was the one leading development, but ultimately it doesn't matter. They were so close to clutching what makes arcade racers tick, but it instead holds a rudimentary grasp on what made its forefathers and other racers in general hold so much longevity. With it failing on the single-player front and failing on the hardcore front, I struggle to find the meaning of Hotshot Racing. No more what perspective you look at the game from, it's a fundamentally failed game that I cannot in good faith recommend. Maybe if you're looking for five or so hours of innocent fun I could say give it a shot, but the fact of the matter is Hotshot Racing is an unfortunate exemplification of one the most painful kind of games-- the more you try to love it, the more it hurts to play it.
(shoutouts to @shininghubee/@gunshoots1 on twitter for gifting me the game btw go watch goldran for them)
Arcade racers, a subgenre left in the dust by the annals of time. A subgenre welded tight between the more realistic, simulation-esque racers and the fantastical, off-the-wall kart racers. Sumo Digital was looking towards the likes of Daytona USA, Hard Drivin', and Winning Run. Its poppy, non-textured graphics do more than enough work harkening back to its forefathers, but to further drive its ambitions home the game interweaves an "easy to learn, hard to master" philosophy into every fabric of its design. Hotshot Racing is far from being the first aspiring indie project seeking to feel a hibernating niche though, far from it. Routinely, these works fall into the pitfall of faintly imitating their forefathers on a superficial level but failing to grasp how any of their core components culminate to form a cohesive whole.
Hotshot Racing kicks it off on the right foot, as on a presentation level it exhibits a level of greater nuance. Instead of simply deriving from its inspirations, Hotshot Racing contemplates the limitation affronted to those games due to computer hardware and decidedly takes the next step. The game's art direction is simply an evolution of other vertex racers featuring a more realized, animated world. The backdrop of each track is extensively animated and the game has four distinct biomes to boot. While these biomes share many of the same assets, each one holds hosts to their own signature locale and sometimes even sport different color palettes. The racers themselves are more individualized, each bearing their own costumes, backstory, ending sequence, and car selection. For the most dedicated players, you can even personalize each of the game's twenty-four cars. In a genre that thrives on the players that dedicate hundreds of hours optimizing their times, superfluous side-content such as this ends ensuring this niche audience will have content to further engross themselves into the game's universe.
Nevertheless, these charming aesthetical additions are of little importance in comparison to mechanical depth when it comes to securing longevity. The centerpiece of the game is the drifting mechanic. Drifting has a weighty, yet tangible handling to it. The reward to it is high; gracefully turning a corner not only maintains your speed but also charges your ever-vital boost gauge. However, the slightest error in your handling can be utterly devastating. It's a simple yet potent dynamic that lends itself to intricate mechanical exploration. On top of that, you have Hotshot Racing's diverse car selection. Its assortment of vehicles forms this nice sense of player expression by throwing a barrage of intriguing, meaningful variables into the mix. Do you want a higher acceleration so you can swiftly speed the competition? Do you want a more accurate drift so you can cut turns with pinpoint precision? Do you want a heightened top speed so you can bolt through the track in style? Or, do you want a mix of everything even?
Such mechanical refinement is worthy of being appreciated and its subtlety is amplified by Hotshot Racing's twenty assorted racetracks. There are five Grand Prixs, each of them journeying through the game's previously mentioned biomes in addition to three different "difficulty levels". These "difficulty levels" are less so representative of how brutally the AI will outpace and more so an indicator of what CC you will be racing at. The higher the CC, the more calamitous the smallest errors are. The track layouts themselves are far from being bombastic, but the delicate touch of Hotshot Racing's drifting mechanic keeps them feeling diversified. These courses act as a test of overall mechanical mastery, with each one slightly remixing itself in favor of one specific skill to spice things up. It gives the entire game this holistic feeling, and by extension further highlights player individuality. I adore how adamant Hotshot Racing is about being a laser-focused, expressive racing experience... which is why I find it astronomically disappointing how the game's balancing can't keep up with its diversity whatsoever.
The Time Trial leaderboard is dominated by a band of three cars out of an array of twenty-four. To be frank, it's terribly demoralizing to see all the time one invested cultivating their playstyle be thrown to the wayside due to unjust balancing. It would be disingenuous to say that these balancing issues are prominent on a casual level, I cleared each of the Grand Prixs on Expert before I even delve into Time Trial Mode. However, it cannot be understated how much this tipped scale spoils the game's longevity. When a majority of the roster pales in comparison to a small, select group of them, it accelerates the game's natural skill progression an unprecedented amount. When you're attempting to play to perfection, why explore the possibilities of the other vehicles that are ever so tremendously outclassed by their peers? It's no wonder the game has struggled to gain any semblance of a community, the game's solved. Only a small niche of players are going to dedicate the time to a racer to truly delve into this level of technicality, but considering the fact it's these same players that keep a game alive for years on end, it's devastating how shallow Hotshot Racing's skill pool is.
This leaves us with the game's aforementioned Grand Prixs and AIs, the latter of which holding host to their own bundle of issues and highlights yet another balancing issue. A common complaint with racers is their infamous rubber-banding AI, and I want to get it out and the way and say that is absolutely not the issue with the game. Rubber-banding AIs are cool, they lend way to a form of dynamic difficulty that gives racer this evergreen kind of content. What is a problem is how overtly aggressive they are. For some bizarre reason, the AI tends to hones into the player in an attempt to tailspin you. Mind you, going for a tailspin at Expert level speeds is a borderline infeasible task that yields high risk and little reward. Yet, the AI manages to accomplish the feat with pinpoint precision every single time they go for it. They not doing this as a desperate attempt to win the race, as doing a tailspin often causes you more speed than what it's worth-- no, they do it specifically to screw over you and only you. Even in Expert It's not impossible to come back from a tailspin, but that does not excuse how much it diminishes the value of skillful play. When you're only one unlucky tailspin away from losing all your progress, none of the race feels like it matters up till the very last lap.
Don't get me wrong however, these AI are still easily exploitable despite how much it seems like they hate you. There's a trick you can do to win every single Grand Prix with ease, and it applies to PvP races as well to an extent-- never get in first place. It is effectually impossible for the 1st-4th place AI to not be in close proximity of you as long as you're in the 2nd-4th place range yourself. So here's the gameplan: on the final lap, get into 2nd-4th place around the second half of the final lap. Then, right before the finish line, use the boost you accumulated to dash right past the competition. This works on every difficulty; the AI will never retaliate by boosting themselves, they will always surrender themselves and let you easily breeze past them. It doesn't even matter if you fail to accumulate the boost you need by drifting, by simply tailing behind another racer you build boost. This plays into 1st place being at disadvantage rather or not you're playing with the AI or your friends, slipstreaming is too strong of a comeback mechanic for genuine, skillful play to feel rewarded. This game's core racing is fundamentally broken to such an astonishing degree, the deeper I explored the game the more it felt like it was directly insulting me for trying to play to its expectations.
Once you've broken the Grand Prix Mode and gave up on the idea of competing in Time Trial, the game leaves you with a handful of additional casual modes. First, you have "Cops & Robbers", a mode in which you amass money by clearing checkpoints and ramming into other drivers. By virtue of this mode rewarding the same predatory aggression AIs exhibit in your standard race and the game's handling not being equipped to handle pinpoint aggression even halfway as well as the AI makes it out to be, this mode isn't all that fun. Then you have "Drive or Explode", a mode where you have to maintain a speed that is perpetually rising or, as the name says, you'll explode. Honestly it's by far the best mode the game has to offer; it stresses the game's fundamentals while lessening the value of obtaining first place. First place is still the chief victory condition, but the survivability aspect adds a real nice dynamic to it all. Finally, you have "Barrel Barrage", a mode where each racer is given a Mario Kart banana every time they pass a checkpoint. It's honestly not as chaotic as it sounds, you're still playing the same game and the AI isn't smart enough to strategically place barrels to begin with. Overall, outside of Drive or Explode, these modes are rather boring diversions at best and are far from being the fun, casual distractions they set out to be.
I've gathered a vast amount of respect for Sumo Digital over the years, so I admittedly went into Hotshot Racing with high hopes. While I initially considered the game a home-run, that initial high grew into confusion, and that confusion grew into frustration, and that frustration grew into apathy. Needless to say, Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital missed the mark. I dunno which studio was the one leading development, but ultimately it doesn't matter. They were so close to clutching what makes arcade racers tick, but it instead holds a rudimentary grasp on what made its forefathers and other racers in general hold so much longevity. With it failing on the single-player front and failing on the hardcore front, I struggle to find the meaning of Hotshot Racing. No more what perspective you look at the game from, it's a fundamentally failed game that I cannot in good faith recommend. Maybe if you're looking for five or so hours of innocent fun I could say give it a shot, but the fact of the matter is Hotshot Racing is an unfortunate exemplification of one the most painful kind of games-- the more you try to love it, the more it hurts to play it.
(shoutouts to @shininghubee/@gunshoots1 on twitter for gifting me the game btw go watch goldran for them)
Ashcan
3 years ago