Screamer PC review — The fighting game of racers

Have you ever played a racing game and thought to yourself, “Man, I wish this were ten times more complicated!” If so, then Screamer is for you. The game attempts a surprising amount between its dense, lengthy narrative and complex gameplay, and it weirdly achieves most of it. If anything, it might be a bit too involved for its own good, as the skill ceiling in this one is probably going to turn away some folks. The achievement is still impressive, however, as the game definitely carves out a niche that I’ve never seen filled before.

Weirdly, Screamer is highly focused on its narrative. I can’t recall ever seeing a racing game where I could say that, especially not to this extent. The game is broken up into several chapters, each with a certain number of episodes. These episodes offer a mix of anime-styled cutscenes, visual novel-esque segments, and individual racing events. Everything is fully voiced in a mix of languages (the characters have implants that allow them to understand all languages you see), which is quite a unique trope. Some characters speak English, others speak French or Japanese, etc.

The narrative itself partially focuses on a single team of racers who make up a PMC that’s angling to knock off one of the other racers for killing their boss years before, but the perspective routinely switches to members of each of the game’s teams, letting you see events from everyone’s perspectives. The voice acting and dialogue are surprisingly good, which I didn’t quite expect. Another aspect that was surprising is that the story mode (called The Tournament, as the characters have all entered into a tournament to win billions) is quite long, easily lasting over 20 hours, depending. Yes, you read that right.

Each character has their own car and special ability, and you’ll be able to pick who you want to play as in Screamer‘s arcade and online modes. There’s even some customisation you can do to each vehicle, too. You’ll unlock new tracks and customisable elements by completing episodes in the story mode, but the arcade mode mostly just lets you start custom races, as there’s no series of challenges within them. Granted, there’s a lot of flexibility here, between standard races, team races, time trials, checkpoint races, and the like.

Screamer‘s cars can really do a hell of a lot. While driving, you can manually change gears, drift, and drive behind other cars (among other things) to increase your boost gauge. Once you fill a bar of the gauge, you can boost. Timing the release of the boost button correctly will let you get a super boost, but the game doesn’t do a great job of signalling when precisely you’re meant to press the button (which led to me having some trouble pulling it off consistently). Each time you boost, you fill another gauge, which allows you to attack other cars with a lunge or use a shield. There’s a lot to keep in mind.

However, juggling all of this can be quite complicated. Cars steer slowly because you’re meant to make frequent use of your drift. Simply racing requires you to simultaneously steer with the left stick, drift with the right stick, and brake with the left trigger, all while switching gears with the left bumper. On top of that, you need to boost when you’ve got it, as well as attack and use your shield too. It takes a hell of a lot of practice to get this down, and it doesn’t help that the cars don’t exactly have as much traction as I’d like, which isn’t uncommon for the dev’s games.

Juggling all of the above at once can be simply overwhelming, and anyone who lacks focus is going to have a bad time trying to keep tabs on everything. As such, Screamer is probably one of the toughest racing games I’ve ever seen. This is great in terms of depth, of course, and anyone who wants a dense, complex, arcadey racing game will likely relish it all. People who just want something akin to the classic Screamer games, on the other hand, might find they’ve bit off more than they can chew. It’s pretty impressive what’s been accomplished here, though.

The story mode’s objectives can be quite demanding at times, too. It’ll often give you multiple tasks, such as finishing the race in first place while also attacking a certain number of other racers. Getting first place alone can often be incredibly daunting in and of itself, too, as the AI has a tendency to rapidly increase in speed, often in impossible ways. You can get a full 200 metres in front of them, and they’ll magically launch in front of you. One particularly egregious race in the first episode seems borderline impossible, as the other racers won’t let you in front of them without racing perfectly. I learned later that you need to use a hidden shortcut in this episode to win the race.

To put it simply, the AI in the game loves to cheat. There was very recently a patch that attempts to ameliorate how overzealous and unfair it can be, but the devs have said they’re going to continue patching it up after launch. Due to this, I’m unsure of what kind of state the AI is going to be in by the time you read this, but it’ll hopefully be much improved compared to the state in which it was during most of my time with it.

I’ve got some nitpicks with aspects of the gameplay, too. You’ll know to shift by seeing UI elements on the top and bottom of the screen turn orange, but you’ll need to see these with your peripheral vision, which can be an issue when focusing. The drifting, in particular, can feel incredibly unwieldy at times, too, although there’s an assist to mitigate this for anyone who finds themselves slamming into walls too often. The lunge attack you can use is awkward to me, as it needs to be charged for a moment, making it quite difficult to actually hit anything until you get used to this.

With all of this in mind, though, I’ve still never quite played a game like Screamer before. It’s got incredibly engaging, challenging gameplay, a surprisingly good, lengthy story, and an attractive presentation. It can be aggravating, and it might be too complex for its own good in spots, but it’s an impressive racer with a lot of heart and a ton of ingenuity on display.

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