Screamer overview: the ’90s arcade racer will get an anime redesign, and I find it irresistible

Your racing video games nowadays are typically cut up between the real looking sort that lean extra in the direction of the hardcore sim aspect or the cartoonier kart racer, the place it is all about characters and shenanigans. I do, nonetheless, miss the interval between the late ’90s and early ’00s when racers might look tremendous slick however nonetheless be very high-concept and did not thoughts a heavy dose of destruction. That’s very a lot the spirit encapsulated with Screamer.

It’s admittedly not a collection I used to be acquainted with within the ’90s, although the unique MS-DOS sport was similar to arcade racers like Ridge Racer, with the added bonus of destruction, where your cars could flip in the air, and its sequels pivoted towards rally-based racers. Its original Italian developer, Milestone, is also more known these days for its very niche hardcore racers like Ride and MotoGP. Yet you might also argue that, with less familiarity, it gives the studio more license to completely reinvent Screamer for a new generation that now includes console players, while retaining the hardcore challenge of racing for your life.

While the original Screamer had cutting-edge 3D graphics for its time, this reboot has all the sheen powered by Unreal Engine 5, though the game is so relentlessly fast that my eyeballs barely have time to register the reflective puddles I’m whizzing past or the smoke trailing behind tyres when drifting.

But it also has personality through its characters behind the wheel, realised like an anime-inspired JRPG from the late 90s and early ’00s. These even include slick animated cutscenes produced by the Japanese animation studio Polygon Pictures, combining hand-drawn characters with 3D renders of the cars.

This could come across as cultural fetishisation, given the story’s cyberpunk tropes, but there’s an international outlook to the cast, made up of five different teams drawn into the titular Screamer tournament. Yes, one of these teams does happen to be a J-pop girl group, but you’ve also got cutthroat mercenaries, funky scientists and corporate gangsters in the mix, and thanks to a futuristic auto-translating tech, the characters are all speaking their own native tongues while completely understanding each other.

Yet as intriguing as the characters are with their different backgrounds and motivations, where you’ll also get to play as the ‘baddies’, there’s something to be said about a high-octane racer with a campaign that can take its time to really get going. You can get bogged down in lengthy dialogue scenes, even if it helps with world-building, such as explaining the Echo tech every car is equipped with that stops its drivers from dying even after their car’s just exploded.

That said, it also takes its sweet time introducing new elements, whether that’s new tracks you may have to race again in another mission or drip-feeding the core mechanics that remind you this is essentially an extensive tutorial.

But once you get into the grip of what Screamer is, and there’s also nothing stopping you from jumping into arcade mode fairly early on, where all the other Echo mechanics are available from the off, then it does truly sing (or rather scream). It’s a wickedly fast arcade racer where shifting up gears or drifting corners (performed with the right stick, which gives a whole new meaning to stick drift) builds a Sync gauge that can be used for a speed boost, lasting longer if you hold and release with perfect timing.

Using sync also builds a gauge to the right of the screen called Entropy, which boosts your striking, eliminates opponents, and refills sync if you make a successful impact. There’s an electrifying push-pull rhythm then making these gauges go back and forth, taking down one car, boosting ahead before you’ve gained entropy to take down the next one, while you can also spend sync on creating a shield in case a respawned and disgruntled rival tries to do the same to you. It’s like being in control of Mario Kart’s offensive, defensive, and boost items without having to pick them up.

Each racer also has their own perks that add extra flavour, such as Hiroshi being able to get in an additional boost after performing a standard speed boost, while hot-headed Irish lass Roisin can perform consecutive strikes with half the required entropy. The biggest risk-reward tactic Overdrive is activated when you max out entropy, which makes you an unstoppable force for an extended stretch, but will also lead to your own flaming destruction if you make even the slightest collision with the environment. It’s nonetheless going to be the essential tactic for the serious players who want to blitz the leaderboards and compete with the fiercest online rivals.

Which is to say that Screamer is as unabashedly hardcore as Milestone’s other racers, and even a few online races with more AI-controlled opponents in the review period had me trailing laughably behind. Fortunately, there’s a very robust offline package that includes split-screen multiplayer for up to four players.

Most welcome is that not only are there difficulty options for the AI, but you can also opt to adjust the game speed of offline races to as low as 50%. It’s then arguably far more accessible than the most brutal high-speed racers of yesteryear, as those who’ve had the pleasure (and pain) of playing F-Zero GX on Switch 2 can attest.