Nitro City Racing, a $5 digital download by EastAsiaSoft, isn’t a typical racing game. It is basically a traffic, almost road rage managing, driving simulator designed around driving fast, without turning, and while narrowing avoiding the other vehicles on the road. Remember that game Stuntman on PS2? It sort of reminds me of that but not as serious, action packed, or detailed.

Awkwardly, the game just starts without explanation or an intro of any kind. Adding to the strangeness, the Start button, not the “A” button is the only button that moves the menu screen forward. It isn’t a game breaker or anything but isn’t the most intuitive.

It is probably better to think of Nitro City Racing as a driving game as opposed to a racing game. From a sequential overworld map, the player needs to complete one, usually short, driving objective before gaining access to the next. RT is the gas while LT is the break – standard controls. However, mission structure is not. For example, one stage might challenge the player to reach a certain distance within a certain amount of time. Other times the player must string a large combo’d number of near misses or drive at full speed for X amount of time. These bite size single objectives rarely take more than one minute to complete but that doesn’t mean they are without challenge. Unfortunately, mission objectives repeat and become little more than busy work by the halfway point. Plus, there are three camera perspectives but none of them are great. I found the 3^rd person over the car’s shoulder viewpoint to be the best as it is easier to determine the distance of oncoming traffic, but it still isn’t great. I wish there was a slightly more top-down perspective to make those mandatory narrow misses easier to manage.

Nitro City Racing is a driving game without turning. Since you only go straight, the challenge comes from not bumping into the many other cars on the road while traveling at high speeds. Sometimes traffic all moves in the save direction. Sometimes the road is split with two lanes going with traffic and two against traffic. One bump causes a full restart of that stage’s objective and grows more tedious overtime. Driving for 90 seconds and full speed without crashing simply isn’t fun especially when you already did it a few stages ago. Sure, the background might slightly change but there is no variation in gameplay, so the amount of repetition is no joke.

For a five-dollar game, this more casual and faster paced experience is totally acceptable considering the asking price… until I was about 85% done with the campaign. Nearing the end, the player can only access this one stage if you have a vehicle with a higher maximum speed. To unlock this fast car, you need a lot of cash. However, this cash must be spent along the way to unlock/upgrade other vehicles to gain access to the earlier batch of levels. Point being, the only way to finish the game is to tediously grind previous stages for a solid hour or two to unlock the faster car required to finish the campaign. This artificial busy work is nothing more than the chore where only the most patient players will take the time. This horrible unbalance between earning money to unlock necessary cars is frustrating and not respectful of the player’s time.

Everything should have been clearable in under two hours but instead doubles that and then some just to grind for gold, which is never fun especially with a game built around repetition. Speaking of repetition, the soundtrack is awful. The few tunes that are in the game are short three second loops that will drive you mad. The soundtrack is easily the worst part of this game and which there was just engine noise instead.

Nitro City Racing deserves credit for trying something different and the approach is respectable, especially given the price point. The pieces don’t always fit together, but this is one of those games that I hope gets a sequel one day, providing a chance to iron out the balancing and repetition issues.

SCORE: 6/10

By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com

X/Twitter: @ZackGaz

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