Music Racer is a vibrant rhythmic musical game set in a futuristic world, developed by AbstractArt and published by Sometimes You. The gameplay is very simple. You select the car that you wish to drive and the world you want to drive down and then move your car left or right to the beat of the music, hitting white icons that come towards the screen. Each beat gives you 2 points.
At the end of each track, you are scored on the number of white marks hit and the number you hit in a row. At the end of each song, those points are collected and stored. Points give you the ability to unlock more cars and worlds to drive down.There 4 different game modes to pick from: Normal, Zen, Cinematic and Hard.
In normal mode, you have to avoid obvious red pillars whilst collecting the white beat icons. Hard mode is more of the same, but there are more pillars and more beat icons. In Zen mode it’s just you and the white marks with no obstacles to hit. The final mode, Cinematic, is just the car driving down an open world with the colourful visuals being the centre of attention. You don’t need to worry about playing, just sit back and enjoy the music.
At first, I found the gameplay a bit of fun, but the more I played the more I realised that it’s just a bit too easy. Even on hard mode I wasn’t having any problems achieving 3 stars for my score. The skills required are very low, especially compared to the likes of other rhythm music games like Guitar Hero. In each world, the gameplay is a little different but still not very hard. Going by the levels I unlocked, it seems to just be changing the light shows. If you want, you can change the colour of the rims and body of the car for the different worlds too.
It seems the game is built around the visual light show that you witness whilst playing. It is very colourful and you can see that’s where the developer’s focus has been. They want to give off a party vibe and you can imagine cinematic mode running in the background of a DJ set. I was hoping there would at least be a multiplayer mode so you could compete against each other, but the only way is to take turns and note down your score. It’s also missing a leader board feature to see who’s been nailing the songs on offer!
It’s a shame there’s no way to bring your own music into the game and have a world generate to drive down and play. It seems that this feature made it popular on the PC version, but with it removed the console version is very disappointing.
I felt it just lacked something to make it spark or stand out. The music they have on offer is my style but I can imagine it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Not all the tracks are great though and I did really only enjoy a handful of them. Apart from unlocking everything, the game isn’t very long. You will most likely get bored very quickly as there isn’t much going on. For achievements hunters like myself, it’s one you can leave on auto-play whilst multitasking on something more entertaining
Conclusion
Music Racer was at first fun to play but got boring very quickly. There’s really only 4 tracks I like and it’s a shame you can’t import your own music. It is visually a colourful light show, but that’s about it – it could have been so much more.
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