A good racing video game
is a mystical experience. A bad racing game is a brutally accurate
simulation of operating a motor vehicle. Horizon Chase Turbo
is certainly not the latter, and, at its best, it often does feel
like the former.
Realistic HCT is not. It is unapologetically video-gamey, drawing heavily from earlier racing templates, calling to mind Cruis’n USA for N64, or even Outrun for Genesis. The 8- and 16-bit influences are particularly strong. In this spirit, the graphics are adorably jejune, the designers giving us an abundance of bright, treacly, primary colors on cartoonish cars that cough out polygonal exhaust clouds while conical trees go whizzing by. Some of the rural racetracks in Chile look like unexplored planets in No Man's Sky. Some of the tracks in Japan are classically Orientalist. Some of the best courses are aglio e olio—just the track and cars in the black of night. Turn up the lovely soundtrack—dreamy techno infused with 8-bit melodies—and the experience is blissful.
HCT's eschewal of realism is most helpful with respect to controls. Handling can kill a racing game: get too real with the steering, and your car is all over the course. With HCT, you barely have to take your foot off the gas as you enter a turn, and rarely if ever will you be compelled to brake. This allows for pure concentration on the velocity—indeed, the speed is very vivid in HCT. Open up on a straightaway, and pretty soon it’s just you and the track. Let your nitro boosts fly, and all at once you and the track are one, as are your hands and the controller. You will ask yourself: "Is it my car that's moving? Or is it the track?" And unlike previous 8-bit racing offerings, that blending won't be a negative. Rather, it will be a positive affirmation of the numinous transcendence that HCT offers to the player, however fleetingly.
Realistic HCT is not. It is unapologetically video-gamey, drawing heavily from earlier racing templates, calling to mind Cruis’n USA for N64, or even Outrun for Genesis. The 8- and 16-bit influences are particularly strong. In this spirit, the graphics are adorably jejune, the designers giving us an abundance of bright, treacly, primary colors on cartoonish cars that cough out polygonal exhaust clouds while conical trees go whizzing by. Some of the rural racetracks in Chile look like unexplored planets in No Man's Sky. Some of the tracks in Japan are classically Orientalist. Some of the best courses are aglio e olio—just the track and cars in the black of night. Turn up the lovely soundtrack—dreamy techno infused with 8-bit melodies—and the experience is blissful.
HCT's eschewal of realism is most helpful with respect to controls. Handling can kill a racing game: get too real with the steering, and your car is all over the course. With HCT, you barely have to take your foot off the gas as you enter a turn, and rarely if ever will you be compelled to brake. This allows for pure concentration on the velocity—indeed, the speed is very vivid in HCT. Open up on a straightaway, and pretty soon it’s just you and the track. Let your nitro boosts fly, and all at once you and the track are one, as are your hands and the controller. You will ask yourself: "Is it my car that's moving? Or is it the track?" And unlike previous 8-bit racing offerings, that blending won't be a negative. Rather, it will be a positive affirmation of the numinous transcendence that HCT offers to the player, however fleetingly.
Needless to say, it's easy to play a game like this. To some, HCT might sound too easy. Admittedly, HCT is fairly simple, in that it's little challenge to finish third right off the bat. However, starting out, it's difficult to win or finish second. You'll need to earn some upgrades for your cars before you can win consistently. Car choice happens race-by-race in HCT, and for this reason, the game is not entirely devoid of strategy. Faced with such a vast variety of tracks, the car you choose has serious bearing on how you finish.
In sum, HCT is not
realistic, but it is so fun to play that it’s almost unreal. Just
how good is it? It’s better than Cruis’n USA. It outguns Outrun.
In fact, your correspondent would be so bold as to say Horizon Chase Turbo is Pro Race Driver good.