Incremental Retro Racing

This month brings us the most anticipated racing game of the year – Forza Horizon 6. But let’s say you want to play a racing game with significantly less hype. Maybe one that you’ve never even heard of? If that’s the case, then let me introduce you to Incremental Retro Racing, a new throwback release inspired by some of the most influential racing games of the 1980s. With a massive garage and a never-ending loop of randomly-generated levels, this is the perfect game for anybody who couldn’t get enough of Rad Racer. Or is it? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Incremental Retro Racing.

Incremental Retro Racing is a game about two things – drive fast and earning stars. And I don’t mean earning stars from coming in first, because despite what the title tells you, this isn’t a race. You instead earn stars from passing other cars, going through checkpoints and getting to the finish line as fast as possible. And then you do that all over again on another randomly constructed course.

Instead of giving you a tournament or campaign to race through, Incremental Retro Racing is more like a playlist of random levels. When one ends, the next one starts, and you just keep going through them on a never-ending loop. Sometimes it will be at night, while other times it’s the middle of the day in the desert or jungle or the snowy tundra. You never really know where you’re going next.

While the endless racing loop is fun for a while, what will hook you to this game is the part where you’re collecting stars. This is one of those games where you start out earning only a few hundred stars per event, saving up for new cars and upgrades. Before long you’ll get a star multiplier, where suddenly you’re making fifty or sixty thousand a race. This eventually turn into millions, allowing you to buy nearly 40 different vehicles and all kinds of useful upgrades, including the ability to drive through cars and other obstacles.

This, coupled with the racing, is surprisingly addicting. The game makes it a point to show you earning the stars in real time, which makes it feel that much more satisfying. For those excited to fill up your garage with the many different vehicles, you’ll almost be giddy when you see your total jump from the tens of thousands into the tens of millions. You’ll have no problem buying a new ride, something that you can use in the next stage to earn even more money.

And to the game’s credit, there are certainly a lot of vehicles to choose from. By the time the credits roll, you’ll have bought a bunch of sports cars, trucks, big-rigs and even a motorcycle. There are police cars, rusty old vans and a double-decker bus. If you loved classic games like OutRun and Rad Racer but always wanted more variety in the cars, then you’ll have a lot of fun cycling through the list.

That said, not every vehicle is worth racing. That double-decker bus may look cool, but it’s so tall that you can’t see anything in front of you. You’ll spend every race guessing where the other cars are, which is a lot more frustrating than fun. It doesn’t help that the game likes to force us into tight two-lane stretches where five or six different cars get bottlenecked. Worse yet, the buildings, rocks and other obstacles on the side have a bad habit of spilling into the road, effectively cutting off half of a lane. That means that you’ll need to race around five different cars in a lane and a half of highway. Not even the motorcycle can make that work.

This is where the game starts to fall apart. You’ll quickly notice that despite initially looking the part, this throwback racing game cuts a lot of corners. For example, the vehicles lack any real animation. They are just still 2D images. If you go back and play those old games that inspired Incremental Retro Racing, you’ll see the woman’s hair move or the side of the car when you make a sharp right turn. That’s not the case here. And once you realize that every vehicle, even the massive trucks, are nothing more than a flat image, you won’t be able to unsee it. You’ll also be able to cut in front of the competition with ease, since the cars are paper thin.

It's also worth mentioning that it will only take around 90 minutes to buy every vehicle and upgrade. While that’s relatively short, I still found that the racing started to feel incredibly repetitive. I was bored of the endless loop long before the developer thanked me for playing. Now, that may be a biproduct of me playing through it in one sitting, but here’s the kicker: There’s no way to save your data. Once you exit the game, your progress starts over from the very beginning. I learned that the hard way.

It's hard to be too tough on a game like Incremental Retro Racing. While it cuts some corners here and there, the racing is fun, at least for a while. The grind for stars and cars is ultimately a shallow affair, and I wish there was a little bit more meat on the bone. If you’re looking for a cheap throwback with more lasting power, then pick up Parking Garage Rally Circuit instead.