Screamer isn’t subtle. Screamer is neon-soaked, maximum volume arcade racing that requires both the finesse of Wipeout and the tactics and aggression of Mario Kart, where dicing for position demands that you think offensively and defensively at all times. Requiring the use of both sticks to fling your car around corners – plus actively shifting the semi-automatic transmission at the perfect time to build crucial boost energy – it’s also a fascinatingly busy racing game. Confidently different, Screamer makes a good case for itself in a genre rarely recognised for a great deal of innovation, despite being let down on occasion by a few dud tracks that slow the pace too much, some unbalanced missions in its central tournament mode, and no clear characters to really care about in its story.
Screamer’s twin-stick racing mechanics see the right stick used to dictate drift angle by swinging out the rear. The pendulum-like effect is a little overly pronounced in a few of the cars – which makes me disinclined to drive those ones – but it remains a pretty approachable system in the majority of vehicles. You have to engage with it; you get mild steering force with the left stick – enough to navigate shallow bends – but if you try to take a sharp corner without using the right stick you’ll simply understeer like a whale on a rollerskate.
Beyond its unconventional steering, Screamer draws inspiration from fighting games with a power-up system driven by two linked meters. In simple terms, one is for boost, and the other is for combat – and you fill the combat meter by using the boost meter. In action, however, there’s a lot of granularity to the system. Each character, for instance, has meters split into different amounts of sections, and each has distinct strengths and weaknesses when it comes to boosts, attacking, and defending. It’s an interesting juggle, even if some of the characters have drawbacks that make them a poor choice for some of the tracks. For instance, one character – who will explode if he clips a wall while in the attacking ‘Strike’ state – is typically a deeply annoying choice for any particularly twisty tracks.
The twisty tracks are by far the weakest, as they take the pace of the racing down too much as you stab the brakes to cater for the constant switchbacks. As quick as Screamer seems at top speed, it’s surprisingly soggy at low speeds.
In contrast, the more open tracks – full of straights and sweeping, constant radius corners – are a hoot. These are definitely Screamer at its full potential – particularly the incredible-looking, neon-lit, rain-soaked urban circuits.
The cars, too, are fantastically designed – and each one looks like they’ve driven straight out of the frame of a ’90s anime. They’re characterised by colourful liveries, wild time attack-style aero, and imaginative flair. I particularly like the pop-up brake lights featured on one of the vehicles. Subtle flourishes like that suggest to me developer Milestone had a lot of fun bringing them to life, and it gives the cars real character.
You Gotta Keep ’Em Animated
Screamer invests heavily into its story mode, which follows five race team trios competing in an ostensibly illegal contest hosted by… a weird man in a mask. The bulk of the characters competing appear to be pop stars, astronauts, and private military contractors rather than actual racing drivers – and the whole thing seems to be managed by a single mechanic (who doesn’t know how shirt buttons work), and his apparently sentient dog (who can drive a car). This all feels a little odd and small-scale considering the prize is an eye-watering 100 billion dollars, but it does sync up with Screamer’s overt anime-inspired aspirations, nonetheless.
The sharply illustrated characters and accomplished cutscenes are very impressive, and the anime sheen Milestone has added here is not an afterthought. You can see the significant investment on the screen as you play, from its sizzling intro to its crisp and colourful cutscenes. It also boasts a lengthy script; seriously, some of these people won’t stop talking. It’s a nice touch having the characters speak in their native languages and yet still understand each other – a phenomenon that’s explained by some kind of universal translator chip. I did, however, miss the meaning of a bunch of early dialogue because I had subtitles turned off. I’d anticipated that, with the game language set to English, that would just turn off the English subtitles, but leave them on for languages other than English. However, that wasn’t the case. They were just off entirely.
Screamer does feel very much like a passionate adaptation of a hypothetical anime series, which is perhaps unsurprising considering the direct involvement of Japanese animation studio Polygon Pictures. The partnership has paid off in this regard, because you really can see it. Unfortunately, in many ways, it feels a lot like an adaptation of season four of that series. The story fills in some of the gaps later, but I otherwise found the opening stanza to be a non-stop salvo of character introductions, and a lot of overly dramatic huffing and puffing about things that happened in the past that we as the audience are completely in the dark on. Characters are either anxious and brooding or twee and extra, and I quickly found it pretty exhausting how much they moan at each other. The story also jumps across all five teams, which made it impossible for me to warm to anyone anyway, really.
Screamer leans into its story immediately – indeed, the first string of events you’ll play are the initial handful of story missions. Only after completing these will you finally be able to back out to the main menu. I’ll concede that funnelling us directly into the tournament has merit, as it does essentially function as an initial tutorial. And this complex brand of racing honestly makes a tutorial crucial. It does, however, temporarily obscure the impressive breadth of the overall package. Screamer boasts a lot of additional ways to play it beyond its curated, story-based tournament mode, but there’s a non-zero chance that some people will bounce off before they see the rest of what it has to offer. It will really depend on your level of patience for mashing through angst-riddled anime characters bickering, flirting, and pointing at each other.
Anime-zing Race
The uneven difficulty of tournament mode may emerge as a source of real grief for some players. On regular difficulty I found myself able to punch through most events in one effort, but there are some that I found noticeably trickier. For instance, one event required me to chase a dog through one of Screamer’s twistiest tracks. All I would have to do is land one successful attack on the dog’s car (yes, it’s driving) and it’d be mission over. However, the dog was annoyingly perfect at negotiating the bends, and was able to consistently maintain a gap no matter how well I drove. Bored of literally spinning my wheels I simply stopped on track briefly, and blasted the dog once he lapped me. Was this method anticipated? Or was it what I was actually supposed to do? Either way, that solution makes this mission feel like a waste of time for all parties involved.
Other events are simply too prescriptive with their objectives to remain enjoyable. One such race will require you to win it, but also take out two ‘Green Reaper’ team members as you do so. But you can’t take anyone out while leading, so you’ll need to let them overtake you. However, they may not be in second place, either, so you’ll need to let other people overtake you, too. And you shouldn’t take them out, because you’ll need to save your finite takedown juice for the Green Reapers.
Oh, and also, in this race the Green Reapers team don’t have green icons. The Green Reapers are blue.
It’s a bit of a miss. I don’t mind a challenge, but I’m skeptical of arbitrary ones that don’t make a lot of sense.
The good news is that, as mentioned earlier, Screamer features a welcome stack of other modes if the tournament becomes too tedious. Arcade mode, for instance, features an excellent array of options and modifiers to create exciting custom races of your own. It goes well beyond simply adjusting the amount of laps; you can change the rate at which your power meters fill, force all cars into the explosive ‘Overdrive’ boost state, and even shut down offensive attacks for pure racing.
There are also a variety of challenge modes with global leaderboards, online racing, and even four-player splitscreen. Four-player splitscreen, in 2026. Somebody needs to send Milestone a fruit basket for that alone. It is true that Screamer’s idiosyncratic handling and character-specific power-ups make it a lot less instantly approachable than, say, a typical four-player splitscreen kart racer – but the depth of the game modifiers you can toggle and adjust does give you a lot of scope to ease new players into Screamer’s racing.
Screamer features a strong suite of accessibility features, too, from a variety of colourblindness filters, an offline game speed slider, and even the ability to totally remap the controls for one-handed use. The latter deserves particular praise considering how fundamental using both sticks is to playing as ‘intended.’ It’s admirable that Milestone still baked in a workaround. The one-handed controls apply an auto-throttle, leave the trigger for braking, and fuse steering and drifting to a single stick. It’s actually a really effective solution, and may well be worth experimenting with for inexperienced racing game players finding the drifting tricky.
