Part racing anime and part arcade racer, Screamer is a hell of a lot of fun.
I’m not all that up on modern anime, so maybe racing themed anime are more common than I realise, but the fact that I know of no one that has smashed together an arcade racing game and bananas anime storylines yet is shocking now that I’ve played Screamer. This is a blisteringly fast racer with a hell of an art style that manages to be tremendously fun once you get the mechanics down. The addition of a bonkers story mode is just icing on the cake.
The story is near impossible to talk about due to how many insane elements there are, but I’ll give you enough to be going on. The enigmatic Mr. A has set up an illegal street racing tournament with prize money of one hundred billion dollars. He invites teams of racers, nicknamed Screamers, to compete for this prize, although his actual motives are unclear.
If this was all there was to it, then it’s pretty by the numbers stuff, but there’s an absurd number of interweaving subplots. One team is entering to take revenge on the leader of a different team for killing their former leader, whilst another is trying to find out why their former boyfriend died in space. Then there’s the team who are convincing one of their members who nearly died that they just have to start racing again, the latter of whom befriends another racer who wants to win to impress his mum. Perhaps we could focus on the girl band that has entered to impress their fans! Or maybe we could spend time with the competition’s mechanic who hates oil but has invented a device that brings dead racers and their cars back to life. Oh, and he has a dog that can race cars too.
It’s wild and I love it. No one cares about the ludicrous prize money and are far more interested in their personal relationships. I particularly liked that most characters spoke different languages which the game gets around by acknowledging that everyone is implanted with a universal translator. A universal translator that the mechanic has tinkered with so he can understand the dog. Nothing makes sense and yet everything makes sense! The fact that everything is presented with visual novel style conversations interspersed with full on anime cutscenes does a great job of presenting this as a legitimate anime series.
The downside of this campaign is that you spend a much greater proportion of your time in cutscenes than you do actually racing. It’s a pretty lengthy story mode, and you’ll get full chapters that are conversations and cutscenes with no racing to be done whatsoever. This is fine enough, but there were points where I was hankering to get back behind the wheel but I’d need to sit through another five minutes of chat first. You kind of need to play through the whole story too as, aside from it acting as a pretty good tutorial for all the systems, you unlock characters and their cars to use in the arcade and online modes as well as cosmetics to mess about with.
I only complain about that element because the racing itself is so enjoyable. Screamer is a drift-focussed racer in the vein of Ridge Racer and its ilk. You’ll be hurtling along straights and taking corners almost sideways in an effort to keep ahead of the competition. Controls are as you’d expect, with the inclusion of the right stick acting as your drift. This means you can take corners normally, or turn and drift at the same time to try and power your way around the corner. You won’t need to apply the brakes very often and you can mostly get away with easing off the throttle and drifting corners. When you get to grips with the system, it’s incredibly satisfying to sweep around corners cleanly before boosting away on the straight.
You have a bunch of additional systems at play too. Whilst all the cars are automatics, you can hit RB/L1 when your revs are high enough to jump into the next gear and give yourself a little boost. This is essential when drifting as your car will often automatically downshift as you round a corner, allowing you to boost away at the perfect moment. Completing these boosts as well as drifting and slipstreaming other racers will build your Sync metre, granting you a super boost that you can activate by holding RB/L1 and releasing at the perfect moment. These types of boosts send you flying up the track, and when timed perfectly can really turn the tides. Using these fills another metre called Entropy that will allow you to charge other racers, destroying them and setting them slightly back in the race. You can spend Entropy to deploy a shield too if you’re worried someone is about to ram you. You can completely fill the Entropy metre to Overcharge and get a massive boost that will also destroy racers you collide with at the risk of destroying yourself if you crash.
There’s a hell of a lot going on there, and the campaign does a good job of introducing these elements one at a time, as well as presenting each racer’s special ability, which is another element you need to consider, so it really does pay to play through it before taking on Arcade mode or, god help you, online! There are some very competent players already, and you’d better be prepared for a trial by fire once you hit multiplayer. I really do enjoy the fact that Screamer gives you all these tools, but it was a lot for me to keep track of until I nailed it all down.
It certainly helps that Screamer is absolutely gorgeous to look at. The environments fly by at a hundred miles per hour and still manage to look great, but it’s the cars that steal the show. They’re all absurdly proportioned, with every colour in existence on them somewhere, yet somehow they look fantastic. I appreciated that there’s a simple damage model there too, where your spoiler or bonnet can fly off after a crash. It has no effect on your vehicle, but it’s nice to include visuals like that. The outfits of the drivers in the cutscenes are equally over the top, which is par for the course when it comes to anime.
Sound is equally well done too. From the pumping soundtrack and the sound of the engines, through to the fully voice acted characters, you’ll find that it comes across very well. If I had to level a criticism here, it’s that maybe the soundtrack kind of fades into the background a bit when you’re fully focussed on racing, but it’s a very minor gripe.
Screamer is an excellent arcade racer with a solid roster of cars and their drivers along with a good array of tracks to race them on. The action itself is fantastic, and aside from the overreliance on long cutscenes, the story mode is really well put together with all the anime trappings you’d expect. I worry that it’s going to get drowned out somewhat due to its premium price point. Being a £50 game is fine when it’s this high quality, but it’s hard to get people to spend that considering the current cost of living. I’m hoping people don’t pass on Screamer though, as it’s a hell of a good time.
Screamer is available now on PC, Xbox, and Playstation.
