[Review] Super Street: Racer - The Switch Effect

Super Street: Racer
Nintendo Switch

Developed by: Lion Castle, Game Solutions 2
Published by: Funbox Media
Category: Racing, Arcade, Simulation
Release Date: Nov 07, 2019

Racing games have found new life in the past decade as graphical fidelity has improved and developer tools have become more accessible for the masses. Racing sims have benefitted the most from this most, it seems, but arcade racers have also found smaller amounts of success in the right hands. Super Street: Racer, unfortunately, isn’t one of those games. It does the bare minimum with only the smallest flourishes to create a wholly forgettable experience.

Starting out in ~~Generic Racing Game Title~~ Super Street: Racer has you pick one of several cars from a junkyard. As far as I could tell the game does nothing to communicate the differences between cars to you. You’re merely choosing the aesthetic of your rusting bucket of bolts before you go in and gussy it up to make your ideal racing machine. Later, you can unlock more cars, but there isn’t any reason too as you need to upgrade every car from the ground up. It’s merely a waste of money for a minor aesthetic change. Nothing in the game is locked behind driving a certain kind of car, so the only reason to unlock them is that you’ve run out of upgrades for your main car. But by the time that has happened you’ve finished all the races the game has to offer.

There’s only a handful of standard event races here, with nothing breaking the mold from what we’re used to. You’ve got circuit races, time trials, elimination, point to point, joy-rides, and boss races (1 v 1 circuit races). You’ll do these on approximately four different maps with the courses reconfigured slightly and at different times of day. Getting first place nets you extra XP (used to unlock the next block of events) and cash used to upgrade your car. You could buy a new car, but we’ve covered why that isn’t a good idea. Repeating races will get you some more money, but the amount is far from worth it.

By this point I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t think the wrappings of the game are very good, but how does it drive? Not great, it turns out. Part of this I’m going to chalk up to the Switch not having analog triggers or buttons. You’re either on the gas ALL THE WAY or you’re not on it at all. But plenty of games have dealt with this issue in the past. But at this point in time you should be designing your game around that limitation. There were numerous times where I was speeding down a straight only to find a sharp 90 degree, or even hairpin turn, awaiting me. Even when I was aware that it was coming it was often difficult to get my car to slow down and respond appropriately when I tried to break into the corner.

The physics don’t help much here. The game often asks you to do some somewhat precise driving, weaving in and out of other cars on the street, or through narrow spaces. The handling on the cars, even one that was fully upgraded left a lot to be desired. If I had had more control over the speed of the car perhaps things would have felt a little better. Though I doubt that would have stopped the car from often ending up on its side, driving along a wall.

One thing that that Super Street: Racer excels at is its destruction physics. Not since Burnout have cars busted up this spectacularly in a console racing game. The developers really implemented a ton of different points of destruction into the cars, so you can drive along as a horribly disfigured skeleton of a car before finally getting taken out, and respawning as a new car, ready to smash things up again. It is amusing how far you can take your car before it ceases to function, but that can only carry the game so far. Also, there aren’t any drivers in the cars. Not a terrible sin, but it does look weird to have cars driving along with nobody inside.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached the end of the complimentary part of the review. Frankly, there isn’t much more to say about the game other than further listing off its faults. The game doesn’t have a cock-pit view, but the views from the front of the car might induce motion-sickness as the car and the camera don’t move quite in sync. The AI drives like it has never played a racing game and begins ramming into other cars early on and has no qualms ramming straight into you. Lastly, the game doesn’t even have online multiplayer. The only multiplayer option it offers is a two-player split-screen. What? I know implementing netcode isn’t simple, but the idea of a racing game without online multiplayer is absurd in this day and age.

Super Street: Racer is such a forgettable name that I struggled to recall the name, even while playing it. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was a port of a mobile game. The lack of variation in courses and event types meant that every event felt nearly identical, just slightly faster than previous iterations. You only need one car to get you though the entirety of the game, and to purchase a single upgrade for the car because most of the upgrades offer the same stat bonuses for your car with only minor cosmetic variations that you’ll rarely notice outside of the garage view. Do yourself a favor and speed past this game to something more worthy of your time and money.