Screamer REVIEW

As a fair-weather fan of arcade racers, I was intrigued by Screamer the instant I saw it. It looked bright, bold and confident. It turns out that that first impression was pretty much spot-on, because the game drips with a sincere love of its forebears whilst simultaneously pushing the genre forward.

A futuristic street-racer, Screamer puts players in vehicles that are equipped with a cutting-edge piece of technology called the "Echo". This grants racers who go out in a blaze of literal glory (or failure, more likely) in the setting's illegal tournaments the ability to come back from the dead. As such, this means that races can be as fast and as treacherous as they need to be.

This comes into play with the game's various mechanics, which all interlock into something that is both competitive and surprisingly tactical. Maintaining speed and drifting around corners with the twin-stick control scheme builds your sync bar, earning you boosts. Executing boosts fills your entropy, which can be spent either defensively shielding or attacking other players on the track.

To add further, the greatest risk and reward is saving up both bars to pull off an overdrive, which will give you a huge burst of speed that is potentially dangerous to your opponents and yourself if you go too hard into a barricade. It's a lot to chew on and keeps you actively thinking throughout an entire race.

On top of this, the active shift element of slamming your gears up as you pick up speed feels great. Think Gears of War’s active reload, but for cyberpunk street-racing. Rather than make players worry about manually shifting up and down constantly, active shift only ever comes into play when increasing speed. Even then, it's more like an optional mini-game rather than a requirement. This not only feels empowering, but it also allows you to concentrate on taking sharp turns and avoiding oncoming threats.

Each car is weighty without ever being clumsy, and each racer has a special skill that was immediately obviously different every time I picked a new vehicle that interacts with boosts, strike or shield in unique ways.

All of this to say... Screamer feels incredible to play. Whilst I'm sure this is the case with many control schemes, I would be remiss though not to emphasise how well it takes advantage of the PlayStation 5's DualSense. Thanks to the haptic feedback and pressure-sensitive triggers, the rumbling of the car felt like having your hands on a wheel in a bucket seat in an arcade. If your floors are sticky and your house smells of stale popcorn, you'll be fully immersed in the arcade experience. Even more so because it’s all set to an incredible, pulse-pounding drum and bass soundtrack.

Screamer mashes together stylised animations for explosions and the blur of boosting technology with gorgeous realistic environments, featuring those moreish neon lights of a futuristic city as well as the wastelands around it. Turns in tracks are sharp and the route changes elevation constantly, making for truly dynamic courses that reward your ability to enter a flow-state with the mechanics.

One of the game’s other major selling points is its story mode. I’ve never played a racing game with this amount of dialogue in it. Initially, I had some gnawing apprehension about whether or not this was something most players would enjoy, especially considering you need to do the first thirty minutes of the campaign before you can hop into a Quick Race.

But like the core gameplay, it's clear that a lot of attention has been put into this. This isn't some tacked-on excuse to elongate the experience. Whilst you can, of course, jump straight out of The Tournament mode after the game has taught you some of its basics and never return, there's actually plenty going on here that I found it kept me coming back. If you let it take you, it will do it's best to impress you, and there's something charming about that.

The Echo isn't just a gameplay device and, instead, has major story ramifications. Racers who enter the Screamer tournament seeking revenge on a competitor are now unsure how to proceed when their target can walk away from any crash, and others are involved in major corporations that are keen to gain control of the technology for themselves. Characters in Screamer are fully-formed, even if the dialogue is sometimes a bit wonky. At the very least, it's all well performed and, in a really unique twist, almost every racer speaks in a different language, which is all handily understood by teammates and rivals thanks to their sci-fi translator implants.

The story weaves deftly through the game's various teams of three characters to keep things fresh, challenging you with different objectives and demands. Occasionally, it takes a sudden turn to stop things from getting stale. Just when you start rooting for one group, you'll take control of another and be forced to beat your previous protagonists. Some of these flips in which racer you control even come mid-race.

Screamer is also loaded with different options, both from a gameplay point of view to add variety for genre veterans, as well as a ton of great accessibility settings, so that as many people as possible can enjoy what it has to offer.

Arcade racing has needed an injection of something for a long time now, and it's incredibly heart-warming to see the excitement growing around this game as it heads towards it's release. It's all the sweeter knowing that Screamer is that something: a joyful celebration of the genre, and a valuable contribution to its long history.

Review Score: ★★★★

Game code supplied by publisher for review, played on PlayStation 5.