Arcade racing games still exist, but only just. The only big budget series that’s still around is Forza Horizon, which is fine if you’re in the mood to zip around in a fairly safe open world.
The full breadth of what arcade racers can be just isn’t represented these days. Fortunately, Screamer is here to remind everyone that, yes, racing games need not be packed with licensed cars, or set in a large sandbox, or settle for that middle-of-the-road “sim-cade” feel.
Developer Milestone has returned to one of its oldest series and revived it for the modern age, and the result is a racing game that stands in stark contrast against the competition.
From the moment you fire the game up, you know you’re not playing your typical racer, with a heavily anime-inspired opening focused on characters as much as cars.
Indeed, The Tournament is the main attraction — a robust single-player story mode that follows several teams as they compete in an illegal Screamer championship.
We’d highly recommend playing through this (or at least some of it) before anything else, as it introduces many of the game’s mechanics one at a time, which is quite important when the racing itself is so complex. We’ll talk about that shortly.
The story is ambitious; there are several three-person teams vying for an enormous cash prize, and each of them has different reasons for being there. Throughout the campaign, you learn the dynamics among teammates as well as their relationships with opponents, and it’s quite a lot for the narrative to juggle.
There’s a big emphasis on character here, and while we applaud the effort, it doesn’t always land.
Much of the dialogue is quite hammy, while the voice work doesn’t fare much better. It all comes off as quite cheesy, which is not necessarily a negative alone, but it does start to grate just because there’s so much of it.
The Tournament is a great way to gradually learn the ropes of Screamer’s racing, and we think that’s the right call. There’s perhaps been an over-correction, however; the mode feels excessive in length, and the narrative and characters aren’t really strong enough to hold it up the whole way.
That being said, it’s an important mode to play as you’ll not only learn the rules of the road, you’ll unlock playable characters, lots of car customisation parts, music, and more.
What’s nice about the focus on characters and story is that each driver has a unique vehicle and special ability. The game really does have a lot of personality — and nowhere is that more evident than when you’re behind the wheel.
Screamer uses both analog sticks in a similar way to Inertial Drift. The left stick steers you as normal, while the right stick is dedicated to drifting.
This alone takes some getting used to, but we were surprised by how intuitive it became after a few laps. Don’t get us wrong, it certainly requires some skill to get right; you’ll need to balance your control of both sticks, as well as braking and accelerating, to make it smoothly around corners.
On top of that, shifting gears up is semi-automatic, meaning the game will shift for you, but you’ll gain boost more quickly if you can time the shift manually yourself. If you always play racers on auto transmission, this can be its own learning curve, too.
At times it can feel impossible to avoid colliding with barriers, and initially it can feel frustrating, but it’s all the more satisfying when everything starts to click.
On top of the basic controls are meters atop the screen that fill up as you drive. The one on the left is a boost meter; fill a segment and you can let off a powerful burst of extra speed.
The one on the right fills up when you trigger boosts, and once filled you can unleash a Strike — an offensive surge forward that destroys any cars you hit. This in turn gives you more boost, creating a virtuous cycle if you can successfully get it going.
Hitting other racers with a Strike can be fiddly; it takes a second to charge, so lining it up is tricky business when you’re all travelling at hundreds of kilometres per hour.
We did find a couple of the courses a little tough to navigate consistently. Perhaps this just comes down to practice, but there are some very technical sections that force you to slow right down if you’re to get through them neatly.
Again, it may just come down to skill and learning the tracks, but there are some courses that feel to us a bit at odds with the driving, which is at its best in sweeping corners and long straights to really make the most of that boost. If everyone’s bunching up in clusters of tight turns, it can quickly get messy.
It’s not perfect, but we love that the racing in Screamer is doing its own thing, and it can feel wonderful when you’re really in the zone.
Helping lift everything is an abundance of style. The aesthetic is really strong, with bold UI, stylised visuals, and extremely cool vehicle designs across the board. It’s all quite over-the-top, and we love that about it.
This is echoed in the sound and music, which is all as full-throttle as everything else with some extremely energetic songs keeping things feeling intense.
We should also say, there’s a lot to do here. Beyond the Tournament are lots of customisable Arcade modes like single races, team races, time attacks, and checkpoint challenges.
There’s also online and offline multiplayer, but unfortunately we’ve not been able to test that prior to publication.
Lastly, we just wanted to touch on the DualSense stuff, which is pretty well executed here.
In particular, one use of the adaptive triggers is really nice; you can feel R2 vibrate beneath your finger when you should shift up a gear — a surprisingly big help amid all the action.
