Review: Rude Racers
Rude Racers is a combat racing game which proudly wears its love of Road Rash vividly on its pixelated sleeve.
Released into Early Access on Steam (for the bargain price of £1.69 here in the UK) the developers Famous Dogg Studios are already proactive in supporting the game and tweaking it based on player feedback.
Like all good games, the concept is easy to understand and play, but has nuances to the gameplay that takes time to master.
The start screen has you selecting between Seasons and Challenges. Seasons takes you through 5 seasons, each with 11 events to beat, while Challenges does exactly what it says on the tin and sets you a variety of challenges where you can win cash and kit.
Cash is important as you use it to buy riders, bikes and weapons, which all help you to progress through the large variety of races on offer. While equipping the correct kit can make that all important difference in winning a race or finding yourself hit on the head with a lead pipe just as you were about to cross the finish line in 1st place.
You pick you rider, quad bike (each one rated on speed/armour/handling) and weapon (bat/pipe/shovel/hammer/baton/cattle prod/mace/nunchucks) and then move on to pick what type of kit (and how many of) you want to equip, be it nitro for those quick speed boosts, a shield to help absorb the blows from other players, or some oil to sneakily squirt onto the road in front of them to make them lose control.
Then you can choose which difficulty to play on, with the harder difficulties earning you more cash should you win the event.
There is a good variety in the AI opponents, and the various tracks constantly throw up obstructions for you to keep an eye open for while battling the other drivers. Watch out for piles of bricks, traffic cones, exploding barrels and even mad pedestrians who wander across the roads seemingly oblivious that a life or death race is taking place.
The graphics are crisp and colourful, leaving you in no doubt what is happening on screen, and giving you fair warning of incoming obstacles…though I still manage to hit far too many things…damn my ageing reflexes!
Rude Racers is a game where you can dip into it for 5 mins, or throw yourself into a longer session to unlock more goodies and progress through the seasons and challenges.
With a great price point and a developer who is committed to update the game and listen to the community, Rude Racers is some old school racing fun that has that \’just one more\’ go appeal.
Kudos to Famous Dogg Studios for making it available on Mac as well as Windows…keeps us geeks very happy.
Review by Dave from a Steam code kindly supplied by Famous Dogg Studios.
