You know those old arcade games and handhelds where you steer a car on a straight road in top down 2D fashion, switching lanes in order to avoid cars?  Well, Nitro City Racing is just that in 3D.  It’s available on all current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

When you start, you’ll need to choose your car.  Only one is available at the start, but you can buy more with money you earn by playing.  You can also use money to upgrade current cars and customize them with paint and whatnot. You can also buy nitro to give you a boost of speed.   To play, just simply drive forward and avoid other cars by switching lanes.  If you can pass cars very close without crashing, you’ll earn bonus points, and those points will increase each time you pass another car close by quickly enough to make a combo.

There are several modes of play.  In Career Mode, you’ll travel around a map with stages to tackle.  These give you missions like pass a certain amount of cars, get to a point in a certain amount of time, do a certain amount of close calls, etc.  If you bump into a car before completing a mission, you must start over.  In One-Way Mode, you simply drive forward as long as you can without bumping into a car.  Free Ride lets you just play without a score and bumping into cars won’t make you stop.  In Time Attack you must drive as far as you can getting a high enough score in a certain amount of time.  And in Two-Way, you drive but the left two lanes go in the opposite direction, making them harder to avoid!

Controls are pretty standard racing stuff.  They give you button prompts on the screen, but I wish some things were more intuitive, like switching viewpoints.  Plus the simple nature of the game makes it get old and repetitive rather quickly.  And it takes a long time to buy anything, especially since everything costs money, even paint jobs and new environments to race on.  I do like simple arcade games, but this one didn’t keep me interested for long.

Kid Factor:

Other than being able to crash into other cars, there’s nothing violent or objectionable here.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but not necessary just to play.  Nitro City Racing is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews