Very good arcade racer, good and fun handling model if you do not want to drift. If you do want to drift, you can sometimes on some turns... tho the car really really really really wants to grip the road even if you tune it to be slippery.

Appearance and performance of the car are strictly separate, so you can make your car look any way you like without affecting performance. Not necessary to make the car ugly in order to win. Nice!

There is only 1 large level to drive on, and it is a highway system at night. There are some differently themed areas, some are more technical with lots of turns... some more high speed with straight lines... tho all of it looks very similar urban nightscape everywhere. This can be boring if you do not think of it as a big race track to learn and conquer, so try to do that and you will have more fun. Would be nice to have more variety of environments, so hopefully this comes later during Early Access...

There are some frustrations with level design, like the IN points having specific directions and there are few and far between places to turn around and go the other direction. It is not possible to simply hop from one direction to the other, so you will be doing much driving around interchanges to finally meet and race rivals as they are not all on the same direction or area as you.

Progression is a laundry list of rivals to defeat. Advancement is a perk tree with victory requirements to unlock better power and tuning options for the cars. There are skills you can slot, tho they do not seem very useful... like 2% more SP health? Not so useful because if you need a bonus, 2% is not going to help win. Upgrading your car is always the better choice for spending perk points because if you are in front, you are not losing anything. Very grindy to collect perk points and money in the beginning, tho with the victory gating, you will be eventually drowning in currencies you cannot spend until you win against the specific targets.

Must emphasize, it is very grindy. Very very grindy. Tho also imo this is not a good game to binge for long sessions, because it is mostly the same level of energy from beginning to end in the sense of excitement over the course of a session as well as the whole story... tho is nice fun for short sessions. The grind can be fun in small doses I think.

Also has an anime shonen style story to give narrative purpose to the racing, and some silly speeches to find and read in parking areas. Not a bad story... very teenager-level maturity, and you have maybe seen it a few times already if you watch anime or read manga, tho not bad.

Interestingly, there is a lot of work and detail in the world building and characters. Every character has a reference sheet to read later if you want to learn about them, detailed almost to the level of a visual novel. Unexpected, tho I am unfamiliar with the other games of this series, so maybe this is a returning feature?

Technically, it runs nicely tho the developers have locked the simulation to the framerate. Tho this is not done badly, because the simulation only either slows down or is able to achieve real time 1sec = 1sec, so it will never be faster than real time and there is no simulation instability! This is one of the rare times where this simulation and framerate locking is a good design choice, because if there are frame drops, you will not see any stuttering or jumping. Because of this, if your game looks like it moves in slow motion and the timer shows 1 sec taking longer than 1 sec in real world, you should reduce your graphics settings...

There is keyboard support for menus, tho better to play with a controller for driving. Unsure of wheel support because I do not have one to test.

Overall is a very good arcade racing game for short sessions. Rare to see good quality racing games like this on Steam and it does not target nostalgia.

Overall this game brought back some nostalgia from the original series. I loved it and had fun and honestly hate that i finished the game. It was a lot of fun and do recommend.

Thank you very much for developing this! It brings back memories from my Dreamcast and PS2 days, I still have the original Tokyo Highway Challenge 1 and 2, as well as Xtreme Racer on the PS2. This has brought back so many fantastic memories of those games. I've only clocked at the time of this review 10 hours of gameplay but its already got me hooked wanting to play it after work.

Things to note : Its Single Player (and I love that), its an arcade racer (dont expect much realism, but expect fun gameplay), its always set at night (thats on purpose and its great), there are some fantastic modifications, upgrades, and superb challenges against the AI.

I do have a couple of suggestions if you don't mind, given this is in early access.

1. Get rid of the breaking noise, its awful.
2. Change "Machine" in Perk menu to "Manufacturer"
3. It took me +/- 3 hours of gameplay to even know there was a perk menu, suggest a tutorial to show the player this.
4. I love the idea, for end game longevity, to add some sort of procedural generation of rivals and or teams which brings a fantastic way to spend potentially 100's or 1000's of hours into the game!
5. The ceiling idea of money, and having to spend perks to upgrade your wallet seems redundant... I recommend not forcing a limit on cash on the player, being forced to buy something seems silly.
6. I would love to see legendary rivals, which have non-standard cars, remember the Dodge Viper in Xtreme Racer 2? Such an amazing surprise!
7. The high speed camera shake for players on monitors that are large becomes really unbearable very quickly, I recommend by default turning this off and allow players to increase it if they want.
8. The livery UI and how to add it to the car needs a bit of work, its not very easy.


Finally, thank you, this game is turning out to be spectacular!