Originating from XBL, Little Racers Street is a cute throw back to the Micro Machine era of 16 bit top down racing where it’s not about power-ups and whacking each other, it’s about racing in the pure arcade sense.
Taking part inside a town, each race takes place in a section of what feels like a giant overarching city. There’s a built up section, some more open mountain road sections and the occasional train track to race along. Whilst that does mean that the scenery rarely changes, weather effects do throw a curveball. There’s rain and snow which affect the handling and become a real challenge as you work your way up the career mode.
Career mode is essentially run the race, collect the cash prize, upgrade the car ad infinitum. Car classes control completely differently however and that breaks the monotony. Controls can be mapped to the controller but the arrow keys on the keyboard work fine. The higher the class, the faster the car, the less stable they become. This comes to the fore as the AI also improves as you advance up the classes too so the difficulty ramps up two-fold.
That’s welcome because Little Racers Street is otherwise quite cookie cutter in its approach. The controls do work well, the graphics are good aside from the slight frame rate issue when there’s 12 cars on track in the night rain and things are quite fun in multi-player. The game is at its best though when you’re trying to squeeze around a tight shopping complex whilst your car is heavily damaged, trying to hold off the competition.
Positives
-Great core gameplay that works well in single and multi-player
-Weather effects throw a welcome spanner in the works
Negatives
-All takes place in the same environment
-Lacks personality
Conclusion
Little Racers Street sounds like a great cute title, but it reminds me of Blur, only top down and without all the added bells and whistles. Death Rally and MiniRacersOnline amongst others do this genre better, but it’s still a competent effort and worth a good look for genre fans.