[Review] RiMS Racing - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: RaceWard Studio
Published By: Nacon
Categories: Racing, Simulation
Release Date: 10.05.21

There’s quite a bit of simulation racing games on Switch aren’t there? I see more with cars, but luckily, RIMS Racing lets you ride motorcycles instead.

Simulation racing games are hard. Almost prohibitively hard, the ultimate gatekeep genre. However, RIMS Racing immediately greets you with some difficulty options. I’m gonna be honest, I immediately went with Beginner. I am awful at simulation games, the Switch is probably not really the best place for them either, at least with Joycons, but we’ll get to that later.

As this is a simulation racing game, the big draw is the career mode. The real meat of the game. Lets start with the garage. The Calendar is where you do events, one per in game day. Races, sponsor and manufacture trials, cups, and just challenges. This is how you’re going to proceed in the game. You’ll get currency and unlock parts doing certain events. Next, is your Motorbike Stand, which is where you can fiddle and customize with your bike. You can also buy and sell parts if you need or want to.

Inside of this, is a section called “Motorbike Mechanics”. This will immediately tell you someone on the dev team really loves motorcycles. Indepth descriptions of each part, their functions, zoom ins, and the whole shebang. This includes all dozen break parts. There’s a lot of parts too, of which can all be exchanged. Want to do this? You get cute little QTEs for changing parts, and this moves over to pit stops too. If you’re in the middle of a drive or race, you can even examine the parts to see if they need touch ups or if they’re really fit for the kind of race you’re in or environment.

There’s even a skill trees! Lets start with the Engineering skill tree. Make wear not as strong, give more tuning slots, the ability to remove those QTEs and make pits and mountings automatic, even making falls not as devastating. Research skill tree gives you more info on parts, upcoming weather on the calendar, or even info on the opposing drivers. Last is Management. Management can lower prices and raise rewards. Sounds nice.

Other singleplayer modes are just standard single races, “Private Testing”, which is training, and the Academy. The academy allows you to replay those Career events, which means if you want to do anything here, you’ll have to play career. Good luck.

What racing game would this be without multiplayer? There’s online and surprisingly offline ways to participate. Online Challenges has you play races using specific cars. The better you do, the more fame you get, the better the reward. This cycles every month. If you want a bit more of a lax online experience, just go into Online Custom Events. This is just standard kinds of races, cups, and so on.

There are a lot of bikes in RiMS Racing. Licensed at that. All of the parts are licensed too. As someone who spent a lot of time in auto parts stores and around stuff like this as a kid, it’s all so familiar to me. It kinda gets me nostalgic looking at these, and messing around with the bikes and parts in the garage.

Unfortunately, RiMS Racing probably isn’t the best game to play on Switch as mentioned earlier. Getting this out of the way, it is a decent looking game, the bikes especially, though the resolution does not seem very good. Framerate is choppy. It’s not chugging alone, but it does have those little micro stutters. The game also never really feels fast unless you’re going incredibly fast. I’d advise not going fast though, since me doing that and attempting to turn almost always lead to a a crash, which would just ruin an entire race. This would often lead me to sitting around the 80 to 90 mark to make sure I won’t spin out, but then the computer in career would just go right past me. Is this a precision issue with the joycons, is this the less than ideal framerate? I don’t know. This all just kinda dampers much enjoyment I’d have.

I’d recommend playing RiMS Racing elsewhere, preferably on PC. The Switch does not seem like a good home for this game. I’d love to try it out on a smoother experience. I can’t blame it for me being bad at simulation racing games, but I can imagine it’d make the game a better time.