Music Racer review

Much like most rhythm based game, Music Racer doesn’t feature a story mode as players simply race down tracks to the beat of the song and pick up small white blocks (beats) along the way until the song ends. As you progress, you’ll earn points which can be used to unlock new vehicles and race track.

Music Racer features simplistic gameplay mechanic as all you have to do is move left to right picking up beats along the way. Before a race, you need to select a car, a race track and a music track and then you’re good to go. No matter the tracks you pick, they all play very similarly meaning there’s little gameplay variety.

One of the game’s strength however is the amount of content that can be unlocked. As you players through various races, you can unlocked a bevy of new vehicles and race tracks in order to get a bit of variety in an otherwise simple and streamlined experience. There’s a total of 14 levels and 25 cars.

The game also has four difficulty settings: Standard, Zen, Cinematic and Hard. Zen is the basic easy/normal setting that is recommended at first. Standard difficulty is similar to Zen except there’s obstacles on the road; you can take a few hits before being game over. Cinematic isn’t a difficulty setting per se. It’s basically a screensaver; watch your car ride along the track to music as you move the camera with the right joystick. It can be dizzying and nauseating, but can serve as a great backdrop when there’s people over that won’t fix the screen. The Hard mode is pretty self-explanatory expect that the game rides a bit faster and it’s one hit game over.

Even on the Zen difficulty setting, the game can be a bit frustrating as Beats are often so poorly placed that no matter how quick you can move the left joystick, you’re bound to miss one and break your combo. Also the way tracks are designed with bumps, it can be hard to judge where the Beat is leaving players missing more. Thankfully, you can move the camera further from the vehicle, but that doesn’t change much.

If there’s one thing the game does exceptionally well is definitely in its presentation. Simplistic menu navigation asides, the game features a gorgeous neon-like retrowave style graphics which really pops off and is highly colorful assuring a visually aesthetic experience. Of course, the core of a rhythm based game is the soundtrack; which falls a bit pretty flat here. It’s nice upbeat but it’s feel uninspired and “been there, heard that” kind of thing, which is unfortunate; it sounds live AVICCI but unpolished.

Music Racer is a great concept on paper, unfortunately it fails in its execution. It looks great; the retrowave visuals lends itself perfectly to this type of game, unfortunately the game is boring, tedious, and frustrating. The soundtrack is meh at best; nothing really stands out. Little to no gameplay; it’s hard to recommend this rhythm based game in a world where Xbox players can get AVICCI Invector instead.