Screamer review: unique arcade racing with one big problem

There's a lot to like about Screamer, out this week on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. First and foremost, it's a bold, novel take on arcade racing, the likes of which we haven't seen attempted for some time. Inspired by classic Japanese anime movies, including the truly phenomenal Redline (which you should seek out immediately), Screamer is set in a neon-soaked 1990s vision of the Far Eastern future. Better yet, the cars all look like the result of a dawn raid on the Liberty Walk parts bin.

Screamer isn't just a pretty face, though. There's pleasing complexity to the action, seeing you building boost and accumulating offensive and defensive resources during a race. It's less of a Mario Kart lottery and more of a considered, strategic process where you generate boost by drifting and hitting clean upshifts and then earn abilities by using that boost.

What's more, the game takes inspiration from fighting games by giving each character their own signature car and special abilities that profoundly affect how and when you can deploy those resources. Honestly, don't let the repeated mention of resources scare you; in the thick of the action it feels a lot less like balancing a spreadsheet than it sounds.

You'll also be gently introduced to these mechanics over the course of an expansive, cutscene-laden story mode encompassing a huge number of circuits. Yet again, it captures the feel of a 1990s anime TV series perfectly, although in a neat touch all the teams of characters speak in a mix of international languages, giving it a unique flavour all of its own.

In terms of the plot itself, it's hardly going to be mentioned in the same breath as Tolstoy, but it gives the game a satisfying momentum in between races. Once you're done with that, which will take several hours, there's an arcade mode for individual races and even a four player split-screen mode, which again is vanishingly rare outside of Mario Kart and its various imitators these days.

As we said, lots to like, but unfortunately the one thing to dislike about Screamer is a bit of a biggy. For some reason, the game has separated out drift control to the right stick, in defiance of racing game nature. It's not like it's an optional technique either, every circuit will have at least a few turns that can only be negotiated at speed by both turning in using the left stick and then manipulating your drift angle on the right stick. This bizarre control scheme is presumably designed to make these cars seem futuristic and distinct from our current, caveman-esque 21st century transport.

Sadly even after many hours of play, this remains complexity for complexity's sake and adds nothing, except to the probability that you will spend your race pinballing embarrassingly off the barriers. Frankly, nothing shatters the illusion of being a brooding anime hero quicker than you clattering your car off a guardrail like you're a toddler at the bowling alley.

The fundamental question, though, is whether Screamer is a good enough game to be worth suppressing every driving instinct and attempting to unlearn decades of muscle memory to master the fiddly drifting. And the heartbreaking answer is: almost, but not quite.