The humble arcade racing game has been somewhat neglected lately, where lately means “for the last decade and a half.” What used to be one of the foremost genres in gaming has fallen out of fashion in favor of its bigger simcade brothers as the expectation for scale and content in game releases grew to unreasonable sizes. Forza Horizon, the biggest racing game in the world, offers all the accessibility of a classic arcade racer while also providing a massive roster of real cars with realistic passing handling, a full open world, road races, off-road races, drift events, single player, multiplayer, and leaderboards. Name it, and Forza Horizon has got it—everything except coherent game design and a sense of genuine progression.
An entire genre being subsumed into one megagame and a few The Crew-sized also-rans has led to a lot of lamentation from arcade racer fans who long for a revival of the genre. And truth be told, the past few years have had enough great games to render this narrative wilfully full of holes. The glorious return of Tokyo Xtreme Racer, the impossible skill ceiling of the Redout games, the no-nonsense family fun of not one but two Hot Wheels Racers: The genre has undeniably been on a slow, steady upswing during the 2020s. It is into this context that Screamer emerges as not just another racing game, but a potential genre saviour.
Screamer is a revival of a game from 1995 that was the first original racing game by Milestone, a veteran racing game studio with countless series to its name, including those two shockingly impressive Hot Wheels games. Although it looks back to Milestone’s earliest history, the new Screamer is a departure from their usual licensed fare, and with its striking cel-shaded style, an overt mechanical influence from lesser known genre classics like Inertial Drift and Blur, and a fully featured single player campaign with no open world or meaningless filler, it’s initial reveal felt like a statement of intent: Finally, racing fans, this is what you’ve been asking for over the last 15 years.
And now it’s out. And all of that is true. But also true, and tragically: It’s one of the most disappointing games of the year.
Screamer is the most heartbreaking kind of bad game, one where competence shines through in every piece of its construction. This is very obviously the work of an incredibly talented team. The cars feel (mostly) good to drive on the track, it runs flawlessly on my computer without a single crash, and the music effortlessly switches between driving metal riffs and spacey breakbeats, keeping an incredible sense of atmosphere at all times. But all these elements get placed together in the final design to create a whole that is staggeringly less than the sum of its parts. There are so many mechanics and systems in Screamer that it’s hard to find the game underneath all the cruft.
To give a basic rundown, here are the core mechanics. You accelerate and break with the triggers and steer with the left stick. Your right stick controls your drift angle. Left bumper controls up-shifts, which—along with consistent high speed driving—builds your Sync Meter. Holding the left bumper when you have enough Sync Meter spends it for a boost; how much boost you get depends on the timing of how you hold the left bumper. Expending Sync Meter builds your Entropy Meter. Holding the right bumper activates a shorter, violent boost that turns your car into a hurtbox which can takedown opponents and send them further back in the pack, and potentially earn points towards a total victory without needing to place first. Finally, as a defensive measure, you can tap the right bumper to spend Sync Meter on a shield instead of a boost. And of course every character has their own signature ability that defines their playstyle.
To be clear: the problem is not that Screamer is mechanically complicated. The problem is that it is mechanically incoherent, with all these systems fighting against each other rather than building to a satisfying whole. The moment-to-moment decision making of the racing is overwhelmingly taken up by questions not of positioning and handling, but meter management. Hitting a corner just right matters far less than making sure you spend your boosts at the correct time, not least because boosts don’t just increase your speed but greatly reduce the punishment for off-track driving and barrier collisions. The game steals Inertial Drift’s absolutely masterful twin stick control model but inherits none of that game’s breadth of handling and expression; every car drives basically the same, and their primary differentiators aren’t in core handling elements like acceleration, breaking, or turning speed, but in special abilities and the way they build and stock meter.
This totalising focus on convoluted meter management utterly destabilizes Screamer as a racing game that could be fun to learn and master. Everything is balanced to keep you in the fray, to keep earning and spending boost, to take out opponents and defend from their attacks in turn, as that is where the heart of Screamer’s unique mechanical identity lies. But this results in a game where, outside of going out of your way to limit yourself in Time Trials or other events, you rarely feel the rewarding joy of slowly mastering a corner, learning exactly how far you can push a drift, winning more races because you got better at actually driving faster. You’re always going forward, but you don’t feel any momentum.
Yes, you can place those limitations on yourself. There are a variety of game modes in the arcade menu, and while the base driving mechanics feel disappointingly shallow due to the game’s over crowded design, you can still find ways to have fun with it; because, again, no individual part is badly made and the team’s experience at racing games still shines through. But that’s where the other shoe drops. Because you won’t be playing any of those other modes. You will be playing the story mode.
There is no kind way to say this: Screamer‘s story mode is a disaster. It emphasizes every one of the game’s weaknesses and plays to none of its strengths. The game is heavily influenced by fighting games, and so focuses on a global cast of national stereotypes all of whom have entered the Screamer Tournament for personal reasons. This sets itself up nicely for a traditional arcade mode, where you see each character’s story, take them through the tournament bracket, maybe upgrade their car along the way, and resolve their personal struggle. That is not how Screamer structures its story. In fact, there is no tournament at all, at least not in any true, mechanical sense.
Screamer’s story mode plays out as a series of visual novel chapters which bookend tangentially connected races. A character will lay out a problem that they are having with another character, and then if you’re lucky they’ll race them on the track; there might even be a couple of lines of dialogue actually inside the race. This is, however, a rarity. If you’re unlucky, the conversation will end and the character will just proceed to have a race, because there is a racing tournament going on parallel to all this character drama. All that matters is whether you pass an in-game event objective (these objectives can change dynamically based on difficulty, so these often aren’t diagetically part of the story anyway), and then you can move onto the next chapter. You bounce from character to character seemingly at random as the story dictates, and are left with no sense of narrative or mechanical progress. You, the player, are not experiencing a racing tournament with highs and lows, upsets and comebacks; you are being led through a series of disconnected racing mini-games while 10 different visual novel plotlines cross cut between each other.
It is a structure borrowed from its fighting game influences, but one that makes no sense here. Mortal Kombat and Tekken settled on these full campaigns as a way to improvise a modern single player campaign out of a roster designed for the arcade, but Screamer is an all original cast. Instead it copies both elements of its influences—the modern interconnected campaign and the diverse arcade roster in personality and goals—and never realizes these two designs are at war with one another. The result is an unfocused narrative in a campaign mode that is both too long and too shallow. The moments where either the narrative or tournament structure actually asserts itself in the play are the strongest in the game, but they are shockingly infrequent, especially in the game’s first half, where nothing happens for what feels like 10 thousand years as every single one of the aforementioned game mechanics has to be diegetically introduced and tutorialized one by one.
This all adds up to a game that can only be described as a heartbreaking disappointment. Screamer has been made with the best of intentions by a veteran team that can make the shit out of a racing game, and I will be there for their next swing at bat. But a series of unfortunate design and structural decisions make the core gameplay bloated and frustrating, and ensure the modes you experience present this core in the weakest light possible. There is fun to be found, and I have faith that the multiplayer scene for this game will pick up a small but dedicated following, as the community spends enough time with the various game modes to find which challenges are the most compelling. But Screamer falls far short of the soaring home run return for innovative, stylistic arcade racers that fans were hoping it would be.
Somewhere far ahead on these winding city streets, Ridge Racer still drifts the corners just out of sight, to us now only a half remembered ghost from long ago. One day we may catch it, but not today, and not tomorrow, though when we do it will be with great back-breaking effort, and in that instant we will realize the folly of our ambitions. We were trying too hard. Screamer is trying too hard. It is desperate to be liked. To convince you that it’s watched the same anime you have. To have style. To have soul. The dog wearing Kamina glasses, the fake BlazBlue announcers, the perfect parry boosts, the team mechanics and the explosive takedowns, the shonen rivalries where every character is constantly at full intensity: It all starts to numb, to tire, and, eventually, to exhaust. You can’t catch up with a ghost. Perhaps the greatest mistake Screamer makes is to forget that Arcade Racing, even at its most intense, is a genre of empty space. Of hitting the drift and watching the Outrun hearts come on in. Even Burnout, with its constant road rage and takedowns, lives right on the knife’s edge where to succeed is to make the impossible feel effortless. There is no such release to be found here, no feeling of the sunshine in the morning as you head for the open road. Screamer is always loud, aesthetically, narratively, mechanically. It spends every last drop of oil chasing that dream of constant arcade action, overloading the ride entirely and losing sight of the only thing that truly matters in the first place. Because in Screamer, the would-be savior of the arcade racing game, it just isn’t very fun to drive.
Screamer was developed and published by Milestone. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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