These nutjobs are driving at nearly 500km/h on a racetrack in the sky, potentially plummeting to their death with a single slip-up. This was the vision the game wanted to sell me, but I didn’t bite until I reached Master difficulty.
At that point, any little mistake has the potential to screw you over entirely. Maneuvering through tricky courses like threading a needle, all while trying to break away, dodge slow back-markers, manage your boost, and hoping a bomb car doesn’t stall in the middle of the narrow road on your last lap. The heavy rubber-banding practically holding you at gunpoint, ensuring that you’ll lose position as soon as you mess up.
Sure, it has a serious lack of content, but it’s so fun and thrilling to return to that it doesn’t really bother me. The tracks and music are incredibly memorable, the difficulty is still there after hundreds of runs, and there’s always a story of frustrating defeat and close victory emerging from the unpredictable races it puts you in. Probably the racing game I come back to most purely to feel speed and adrenaline.
