When Fast & Furious: Spy Racers came out earlier this year I jumped on the chance to review it. Having been a pretty hardcore fan of Vin Diesel’s ‘Mythology’ and having enjoyed Fast & Furious: Crossroads I was keen to get another fix.
In preparation I decided to watch some of the show it was based on, hoping to get some insight before playing the game. I stopped after one episode, I am sure it has its fans, but the series took the wonderfully off the wall theatrics of the movies and turned it into a cookie-cutter kid’s show that sucked the soul out of the franchise.
The review copy never came and instead I purchased this on sale last week. Now with single player done and a handful of Multiplayer games played, I can say this – the game lives up to the cartoon’s standards.
Spy Racers is split between Campaign and online multiplayer. The Campaign can be played in single player or splitscreen and has 5 tournaments (with all but the last one having 4 tracks each). These are split across a range of locations that are nominal callouts to some of the sets from the films but probably have more prominence if the player has seen the cartoon.
Racing in, and winning tournaments, earns currency that can be spent to unlock new racers, decorations for the main menu, music, and new skins for the existing cars.
The races themselves consist of three laps and as the player successfully drifts, they build meter that allows them to trigger special abilities that will give them the edge against their opponents.
The car models are all reasonably nice and the tracks themselves look like they have had a lot of attention: muddy favelas, arctic facilities, and slick urban surroundings have flare.
It is just utterly devoid of any kind of fun. The AI are braindead and can be overcome with little consequence – proving to be mild annoyances when they trigger their level 4 specials. Each track is very wide, so taking most corners at full drift is not much of a problem and the only real challenge in each race is avoiding invisible collision on some corners that will stop the car dead in its tracks.
If you can con a friend into playing spiltscreen then things improve significantly, but it doesn’t help that the game never really feels Fast – every car is supposed to be going over 100 mph but there is no sense of speed.
The multiplayer is dead, to their credit the developers have avoided the problem Crossroads had by populating the dead matches with AI. As mentioned, though, the AI is just uninspiring.
I understand that this is a game designed for young fans of the TV show (all 5 of them) but there isn’t even a difficulty slider for those interested in laying down a challenge for themselves.
The ultimate crime of any game is to leave me bored, and Spy Racers deserves life for the tedium it inflicted on me. If you have a kid that loves the cartoon, and this game is under a fiver, maybe get them this. Otherwise just buy them anything else and put the tepid cartoon on instead.
Conclusion
Spy Racers is competently made but such an uninspired slog through a dire spin off. Soulless and saddening.
This copy was purchased by the reviewer and played on the Xbox Series X
