WARNING!!! STEAM VERSION HAS NO CROSS PLAY!!! With the limited player base, i'd recommend buying it on the windows store as I heard that version has cross play but can't confirm yet myself. It took a long time to get into a room and only about 6 players online. The game is great and highly underrated, I just can't recommend the steam or epic version unfortunately.

Worth it if it's on sale, but opt for the legendary edition if you care about achievements as some are tied to DLC tracks. It does launch with Epic, but you can opt out of their in-game services and not connect your account.

I got this game and all of its DLC at a steep discount. I dunno if I'd recommend this at full price, but during a sale? This game's worth it. There are a lot of improvements over the first game. I ultimately gave the first game a thumbs down despite liking it due to shady monetization schemes such as the Battle Passes (and by extension, missable content even if you paid for it). Here, however, crappy stuff like that is done away with. You pay for the thing, you get the thing. Nothing is missed.

So that said, there's a lot of good things to say. If you liked the gameplay of the first game, you'll like the gameplay of the second. It's mostly more of the same, but with some little tweaks to feel a bit smoother. Like the first, cars have a nice, weighty feel. Drifting through several turns at high speed can be a bit challenging but very satisfying to pull off. There are also track skips you can discover, which I'll get a little more into in a moment.

Of course balance is still thrown out the window. Including DLC, there's over 200 cars, and some are blatantly better than others. But nonetheless, each car can feel pretty different, which encourages a lot of experimentation to find what you like best.

There's several new mechanics this time around. For starters, there's still a car upgrade system. Similar to how the first game had Common, Rare, and Legendary cars, here every single car (no matter the rarity type) has Stock, Powered, and Ultimate. As you upgrade the vehicle, its stats not only improve, but you're given a number of skill slots. Using various perks, you can further adjust stats, change the boost type, and even make the car invulnerable towards most track obstacles. Also, unlike the first game, you can have dupes of every car, including Secret and DLC cars. So if you want Stock, Powered, and Ultimate versions of DLC cars in your collection, you can do that.

You're also given some new abilities to work with. On top of the general driving and boosting from the first game, you can now jump, double-jump, and side dash (both for attacking opponents and making quick adjustments on the spot). These all consume a bit of boost, so there can be a bit of strategy. You might want to sometimes hang onto a bit of boost in order to make a jump... and that gets into shortcuts.

At first glance, significant track skips aren't quite as obvious as the first game. Checkpoints are a lot more frequent, and it can be harder to find chunks of track to skip via rocketing off the beaten path and flying through the air via boost. However, thanks to the jump ability, there are still plenty of clever little shortcuts that can be found. It just requires a different approach of creativity and a bit of environment manipulation.

Another improvement over the first game is the car unlock system. No more dumb lootbox system. You have a shop that refreshes every 45 minutes, it generally prioritizes cars you don't have yet, and you can refresh the shop anytime you'd like for a very small amount of in-game currency. Races and the career mode in general provide plenty of coins and XP, so you'll pretty much always have what you need (or the time to get what you need) to add more cars to your collection. I managed to get every car in the game, save for two Secret cars, before I completed all the DLC extensions to the career mode. On top of this, thanks to things like numerous in-game challenges, a roulette wheel, and the fairly generous XP system, you're pretty much constantly getting showered in rewards. Progress just feels way better here than the first game, period.

Speaking of the career, it's mostly the same as the first game, though the addition of a few extra modes gives it some more variety. There's races, time trials, elimination, drift challenges, and "waypoint challenges," which are essentially time trials, but instead of tracks, you're driving across the environments themselves and have to reach checkpoints as quickly as you can. Unlike the first game, things like the difficulty of time trials actually scale with whatever difficulty you chose in the options. So if time trials were a huge hurdle for you in the first game, they're no longer so bad here. That said, don't think the difficulty is just straight up gone...

Once you complete the career, you gain access to "Extreme Events." These tend to be much, much tougher, with some being even harder than stuff you'd find in the first game. Completing them is optional, but they can give you some real nice rewards, so they're worth checking out... especially if you love a good challenge.

As for the multiplayer, I can't comment. I've heard it's not as good as the first game's multiplayer, but if you're like me and not really interested in online multiplayer, then there's really not much to fuss about.

Track Builder is back, and it's a bit smoother and easier to use than the first game. That said, AI is still not supported on custom tracks. This is such a shame. It was one of my major complaints for the first game, and I feel the devs had a real chance here with the sequel. On the bright side, the base game and DLC tracks are all super good. I just wish we could also get more out of custom tracks than time trials, drift challenges, and multiplayer. So many games with custom track-related stuff support AI, so I don't understand what's holding back Milestone.

Outside of that, I honestly cannot think of any real negatives. This is a super solid game that improved upon a lot of issues I had with the first. Maybe this all sounds like it'd be worth full price to you, maybe it doesn't. But if there's a sale, I say absolutely get this if you're a fan of arcade racers.

P.S. Just a heads up. This game does have an anticheat system in place. If you were prone to using cheat tables and trainers in the first game, you may want to tread carefully here.