Rev Up! RC Grand Prix is supposedly a game about racing RC cars, but there’s really no way to tell that they’re not supposed to be regular cars other than the giant people. Games about racing small cars typically borrow from titles like Micro Machines and have crazy household tracks, hazards like pets or pencils, or all sorts of powerups and weapons. Rev Up! has exactly none of that.
Instead, it has 24 tracks with no unique visual or mechanical themes divided across six grand prixs that have equally little to distinguish them. Most of the tracks are actually decently well designed, but they all take place in the same fenced in plot and the AI behavior doesn’t change noticeably ever. There are a handful of different car models and a bunch of unlockable colors, but they all handle identically and customizing your car doesn’t seem to change anything either. The only meaningfully different thing across all 24 tracks is that, for some reason, the last 8 tracks aren’t mapped to a grand prix and you have to add them as a custom set yourself.
It’s a shame because the tracks are, again, mostly pretty good. They have interesting designs and make good use of changing levels and even jumps. But since the visuals never change and the racing systems are so barebones, they all still manage to feel the same. It reminds me a lot of Garfield Kart in that it’s a bad racing game with tracks that really deserved to be in a better racer.
Once you’ve won all the grand prixs, there’s nothing else worth doing in the game. There’s no reason to play multiplayer when a million better and more interesting games are out there, and there’s no reason to mess with vehicle customization when it doesn’t do anything. You could build your own tracks, but why would you do that in this game over the many other better games that also have more in-depth track builders? Worst (or maybe best) of all, it won’t even take you much time to reach this point. I beat all the tracks in under an hour. I’ve been playing a lot of GBA games recently, so I can say with some authority that nothing except the graphics would have been impressive about Rev Up! even if it had come out 20 years ago on a handheld.
Rating: 30%
Time to beat: 1 hour.
MSRP: $10
You can follow my Steam Curator page for more reviews in the future.