Victory Heat Rally is a retro-styled racing game that plays like a mix of Mario Kart and 90s arcade racers like Daytona and Cruisin’. Racing is all about charging a three stage drift meter like in MK, but the course design and presentation are straight out of the arcade. I love both styles of racer and I fully expected to love VHR as well, but it fails because it does too much in some areas and too little in others.
Starting with where it does too much, VHR insists on making you play a random minigame after most of the levels of each world. These range from fine to completely terrible, and each of them also makes you watch an unnecessary tutorial video the first time you encounter it. Most of the minigames are just variations on “drive around the normal course without hitting anything”, but there’s also a slalom event and a drift attack. You’d expect there to be a rally mode based on the title of the game, and there is, but confusingly it’s not actually a rally mode at all. The map is removed in favor of having navigation callouts, but you still win by passing all the other drivers and there’s nothing at all different about the tracks. None of these alternative modes really feels fully thought out or finished, and the game could have been much better if it had focused on a couple of them and deleted the rest.
The effort saved on minigames could also have gone to making the game’s campaign feel more like an actual tournament. Most games in this style would have each “world” be a grand prix against a bunch of other named characters and let you progress to the next level if you finish top of the table. VHR instead makes you play a bunch of one-off races against completely anonymous competition before finishing each area with a 4 race grand prix in which everyone is still anonymous except for a single rival. The rivals are Worse, the difficulty calibration is unbelievably bad. It’s almost completely trivial to win every race until partway through the second tournament, when the difficulty abruptly spikes dramatically and requires you to play almost perfectly to have a chance. Since the draw distance is too short and controls too loose to have much of a chance at doing that on your first race, that means you’ll likely be replaying levels until you’ve memorized the course well enough to drift all the way through it. It’d be one thing to go to all that effort if you were going to at least get something cool for it, but usually it’s just more races against “Driver 5” on the same tracks. At best you unlock a rival as a playable character, but sometimes even they have designs as uninspired as “guy with a hat covering his face.”
Still, it’s passably fun until the difficulty spike ruins everything. Some of the course designs, like the roller coaster, are pretty cool. The drifting system works well for most of the early races and getting off a stage three boost is always satisfying. I also particularly liked the way crashing into a lapped opponent causes them to explode and fly off the track, although it would have been even better if said opponents had any kind of personality.
Conclusion
VHR is a great looking game with an even better soundtrack that, unfortunately, just doesn’t do anything else particularly well. The campaign goes right from being too easy to be exciting to being too frustrating to be exciting, and it’s mostly just races against 11 identical gray cars. I could see the multiplayer mode being decently fun if you’ve got someone else who wants to play it, but even then I don’t think it would be long before you’d end up wanting to play one of the games that inspired this instead. And that’s what really kills it in the end. Why play this when there are already loads of other arcade racers that do the same thing better?
Rating: 60%
Time to beat: Abandoned after 4 hours. Probably 8-12 if you wanted to finish.
Price: $20
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