Racing and music, and racing, and music... what more could you ask for?!
A game that looks to give you a good time but with the limitations brought to the console it lets the game down.
I'm quite a fan of these style of games, usually like the music as well but with this game it was hard to get into. This game from Sometimes You, Music Racer is an arcade style rhythm game, where you collect musical notes while avoiding obstacles as they are spread across three separate lanes. The track itself reacts to the music that you are playing, giving you a fluent and dynamic experience. At the end of each track you're given a star rating and a number of notes to spend on new cars and tracks. It's a simple premise that is never built upon. From a gameplay perspective therefore, Music Racer lacks any real substance. You pick a track, then you collect notes. And then you do it again, over and over, rinse and repeat.
There are three different game-modes but they are rather disappointing because they're all just different variants of the 'normal' mode. Cinematic isn't even a game mode, as it only lets you view the tracks, with the obstacles, notes and your ability to control the car all removed. Zen Mode has no obstacles whatsoever, and Hard Mode is a simple one-hit kill - hit any obstacle and you're done.
The gameplay itself is fun at first but after a while it becomes a bit stale it makes up for it in customisation, the amount you can do for your car is actually really cool. I made mine into a police car because I could but there are a lot of choices including legendary cars from movies because who wouldn't want to drive down a musical highway in KITT? Props to the readers who know who KITT is. Those willing to grind for a few thousand notes can land themselves with a pretty sweet ride to race along with and then you can customise everything you buy by changing the colour of the car and its rims. I have really appreciated the effort the devs have put into the customisation.
There is no denying that the game itself is beautiful. The graphics are crisp, the tracks look really nice and especially how the tracks react with the songs and the cars themselves look really nice as well, there's a choice for everyone, which is essential with customisation.
However, with a game called Music Racer, it should be pretty obvious what the most important thing is. The music, which me personally is a bit of a let-down since Music Racer's selection isn't anything special. There are about 20 or so songs in total and all of them kind of sound like royalty-free electronic music that you can find anywhere on YouTube. I understand in some circumstances because licenses for actual songs can cost an absolute fortune and the selection isn't the worst. The library wasn't really to my liking but I've never been a techno person in all honesty, my family are all musicians including myself and I've always been classic rock/rock/metal kind of person but its great to try a variety here and there. The main thing that this game needs, is custom content music wise. I'm not sure why it couldn't but Xbox has Spotify so I think it would have been a great idea to use Spotify to support custom songs but we can't have everything.