Arizona Derby

My first session with Arizona Derby felt like finding a hand-drawn flyer for a underground street race stapled to a telephone pole - the energy is real, the execution is held together with duct tape. Falcon Interactive's solo-only off-road arcade racer drops you into a world where exotic supercars get slapped onto oversized wheels and sent screaming across checkpoint-based dirt tracks spread across six global locations, from a Siberian snowscape to a Dubai desert. It is an oddly ambitious thing for a studio this size, and some of that ambition actually lands. The structure works on paper. You grind through a gang hierarchy - beating regular racers to unlock stage bosses like the tropical storm-chasing Cholo or snow-bound Marushka - earning XP and in-game AD$ to upgrade your ride or buy from a roster that tops out near 90 vehicles. Bonus scoring rewards In-Air Time, Car-to-Car Crash hits, and nitro-boosting, which gives each eight-driver race a slightly more arcade feel than a straight time trial. The AI difficulty scales from forgiving to a setting called Insane, and cranking it up multiplies your score payout by up to 4x, which is a smart loop to keep competitive players hooked longer than the first hour. Here is the honest part though. The physics are the single biggest obstacle between you and a good time. Small bumps in the terrain can stop your car dead like you hit a concrete pillar, and the handling feels like the grip model cannot decide whether it wants to be simcade or pure arcade. Controller support technically exists, but Xbox pad users have reported needing to manually remap bindings via Steam overlay templates before the shoulder buttons work at all - not a great first impression for pad players. Optimization complaints are also consistent across player reports, with some users seeing severe frame drops when running behind the lead pack, which is exactly when you need the frames most. To the developer's credit, hundreds of patches over several years have trimmed the install from roughly 65 GB down to around 26 GB and significantly improved frame rates, so the game is in a meaningfully better state than at launch. Audio is genuinely divisive. There is a custom hip-hop soundtrack produced by Houston rapper TxMic that is completely intertwined with the game's identity - either you find it hyped and fun or you will be hunting the mute button inside your first race. The 120 additional licensed tracks covering rock, electronic, and dance give you an out, at least. Visually the game uses Unreal Engine with vivid colours and decent car detail, though AMD users are flagged as potentially needing higher specs due to the engine's Nvidia and Intel preference. No split-screen, no local multiplayer - this is a strictly solo experience, so Friday night couch sessions with friends are off the table. For the price point this sits at, the sheer volume of content - over 30 tracks, multiple locations, deep car upgrade loops, airdrop collection mid-race, drone mechanics, and boss encounters - is genuinely hard to dismiss. If you can make peace with twitchy physics, a controller setup that needs a small workaround, and a personality that is more energy drink commercial than polished release, there is a scrappy offroad arcade loop buried in here worth a few evenings. If you want tight, responsive driving above all else, look elsewhere.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on Arizona Derby.