NeoSprint Review – Tiny Racers Going Fast

Racing games can come in many different sizes. You have your highly detailed racing sims and action-packed arcade titles, and then you have your simple yet stylized racers that are quick fun. NeoSprint from Atari is the latter, offering an RC car-like approach to racing that can be fun. It’s a new take on a classic Atari racing game named Sprint 2 from 1976, which went on to have a few sequels in the years that followed. While things on the racetrack are simple all around, it doesn’t escape a few hurdles that can cause the experience to swerve toward disaster. The game could use a tune-up for the better, but that doesn’t take away the fun to be had that’s built into it.

Game Name: NeoSprint
Platform(s): PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PC
Publisher(s): Atari
Developer(s): Atari
Release Date: June 27th, 2024

Races happen through an isometric view in one of two ways, either focused on the racetrack or on your individual vehicle. Either way of playing works out well when it comes to controlling your car, but can change how you plan for obstacles on the track. The zoomed-out focus on the track can give you a full layout of the course, giving you ample opportunity to adjust your driving. It looks more like the classic Sprint games from back in the day. However, the zoomed-in vehicle perspective plays more brings the action closer and feels more action-packed. You can see the distance between vehicles better and make smaller adjustments in your steering, as well as see your car better when going under pieces of the track as everyone loops around the course.

Steering your vehicle is fairly straightforward, as is winning races. Nothing too complicated about trying to come in first place. But it’s the physics of everyone’s vehicles and the hazards you come across that will mix things up. A lot of what will influence the outcome of races will be the speed and angles from where your car slams into things, which can drastically affect your leads and how quickly you recover. There are plenty of moments when you might be winning a race and be thrown for a loop by hitting a curve at the wrong speed and angle, causing you to come to a screeching halt and struggle to recover. Luckily, the game has a quick recovery option to put your car back on track and in the right direction, but at a great cost of speed and startup. This can give other drivers a big chance to recover ground and take the lead quickly.

While moments like this in NeoSprint will be frustrating, the game never feels cheaply difficult. If you can get a grip on how to make turns and when to accelerate or decelerate on the track, then driving on the most complicated tracks isn’t as bad as it looks. On top of that, CPU racers you encounter never display a feeling of “rubber band difficulty” at any point, a common issue with racing games where it seems like opponents will catch up to your lead seemingly out of nowhere. This goes for both general opponents in races and some of the “boss characters” you encounter during the Campaign mode, which act like one-on-one races. These encounters can be tough when learning the track at first, but are never unfair or too difficult.

There are many game modes to explore within NeoSprint, a lot of which is to be expected from just about any racing game. You have your single-player modes with the Campaign, Gran Prix, Time Trials, Challenges, and Free Races to dive into. Each of them will have you going through several different racetracks that get progressively challenging. While modes like Free Race and Time Trials offer some element of customization, you’re more restricted in the Campaign and Gran Prix modes as to what track is laid out. Each of these modes has you racing a lot, especially on familiar tracks with minor changes to the backgrounds. Unfortunately, you need to complete the Campaign mode races to unlock the majority of tracks to use in modes like Free Race, as most of the tracks are locked behind it. It makes jumping into NeoSprint immediately for some races alone or with a friend a bit tedious. Campaign mode is split into three main Cups, with multiple tracks within them to complete. So there’s a lot to get through if you want to see the majority of the racetracks the game has to offer.

The Time Trials and Obstacle Course challenges are exactly what you might expect. Either run through one lap of a course quickly for a new record time, or try to make it through a lap without hitting any obstacles. The challenges are much more tedious to tackle, especially when you have a lot of hazards on a track you need to navigate through without touching. Hitting even one of them adds a lot of time that can prevent you from earning a medal to complete them. The first few tries you have with a course might be frustrating, that is, until you learn the course and figure out the best way to get around to the finish line. Most of these challenges need to be unlocked through Campaign before you can try them out. But finishing them with a gold medal can unlock new custom track pieces, as well as new cars and new color schemes for them.

Outside offline single-player racing, NeoSprint has customization modes that let you create your tracks and race against others locally. Up to four players can race against each other in multiplayer, but it is not online. This is a major missed opportunity for NeoSprint, especially since racing games thrive with online communities that compete and share content, greatly enhancing their experience. But while you can’t play against other people online, you can still share custom racetracks with everyone.

The creative parts of NeoSpark are interesting, but limited until you play through most of the other game modes. Most of the track parts one can use in building new tracks need to be unlocked by finishing Campaign or Time Trials and Obstacle Course challenges. You have a very limited amount of items to use without doing so. But as you begin to unlock more custom pieces, the track builder opens up. You can get pretty creative with how you lay out a new course and place objects and hazards on there, including tracks that can play with the physics of how drivers steer on the course. Getting things right for a custom track will take time, especially when you try to have parts that require cars to jump through the air. But once you have a new course made, you can easily upload and share it online for others to try out. The same goes for downloading custom tracks made by others, which you can download and play through in the Free Race mode. However, you cannot edit tracks you download from other players in the track builder, which is a shame.

NeoSprint is a fresh take on a classic from Atari’s past that works out well. A few changes and tune-ups to different modes would make this a champion-class racing game, even for those who like arcade-style racers. The lack of online modes severely dampens how much it will be played, despite how custom tracks can be easily shared with others online. It almost defeats the purpose of being able to do so when you can’t race with anyone else online who is remotely interested in trying out any of your custom creations. That doesn’t ruin the overall package that NeoSprint is, but it does, but it does keep it from standing on the podium of other great racing games. A few updates and changes might remedy that over time, but what’s here is still good for a new take on a classic racer.

NeoSprint will be available on June 27^th, 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC.