Extreme Racer

Car racing is a very exciting sport, but most of the competitions have a lot of rules the drivers have to abide along the way. Hence, in many ways the sport becomes less exciting, although you can still witness great moments, and sometimes a few dangerous moments. On the other hand, video games can simply ignore these rules and allow you to be as reckless as possible.

Extreme Racer is a casual racing game in which there are no rules other than getting to the finish line in one piece. You can smash into the other opponents and drive as recklessly as possible along the way, and the only drawback is that you might crash too hard and lose your position. Even so, it’s nice to forget about the rules for a while and see just how violent car races can be.

To begin with, there’s only one car and one track to choose from, which is quite the bummer. You can gather currency to acquire more tracks along the way, but it takes a while, and that’s if you manage to get the first place every time. In fact, it might take too long for you to stay excited about the game, given the fact that the mechanics are rather simple and badly implemented anyway.

The most difficult thing in the game is the steering, because for some reason the cars refuse to take corners. Even if the track is made of dirt and the speeds are rather tiny, the cars don’t slide or turn properly when you require them to. Hence, it’s always a struggle to negotiate a corner, and even the AI has problems doing this, given the fact that the other cars are always crashing whenever a turn approaches.

Lastly, the graphics are nothing out of the ordinary, although they could be worse. In fact, the graphics are the best part of the game, which is not much of a compliment. Even so, the repetitive environments and lack of proper special effects make it difficult to believe that the game came out this decade. The sound effects are even worse, but then again those can be disabled.

Extreme Racer could have been a much better game if the developers had devoted a little bit more time to it. However, this is nothing but a tasteless racing game with repetitive gameplay, poor controls and terrible physics.