Electro Ride: The Neon Racing

I'll be straight with you: the first twenty minutes of Electro Ride had me grinning at the screen like I'd found a lost arcade cabinet behind someone's sofa. The aesthetic is genuinely stunning. All-black Eastern Bloc cars traced in pink, blue, and yellow neon, tearing through neon-soaked reimaginings of Warsaw, Prague, Moscow, and Berlin in an alternate history where the Soviet Union became a glowing technological utopia. The synthwave soundtrack fits the mood perfectly, and there is a real sense of atmosphere that very few budget indie racers manage to pull off. Then you actually try to steer. The handling is where Electro Ride makes its controversial bed and lies in it. The cars are twitchy in a way that feels less like arcade fun and more like driving on ice with a broken wheel alignment. Corners can send you spinning into barriers before you have consciously started turning, and the reset mechanic, while present, costs you enough track position to feel genuinely punishing. The boost system is the game's most creative mechanic: you collect colour-coded stars (pink, blue, or yellow) that paint your car's neon, and only boost pads matching your current colour give you a speed surge. It is a clever idea, and in a local split-screen session it creates real rivalry. In practice, the impact of boosts is inconsistent, and the AI largely ignores the colour-matching logic while still keeping pace thanks to obvious rubber-banding. Structurally, you get a Story Mode with 15 races spread across five countries, each country offering a standard race, an elimination round (last car on each lap is dropped), and a one-on-one boss battle that unlocks a choice of new cars. Quick Race covers Time Attack, Last Man Standing, and Ghost Mode across 20 tracks. Split-screen local multiplayer is available, which is the main reason I would ever load this up with friends. I will be honest: as a couch co-op vote it barely scrapes through, but that barely-scraping is doing a lot of work at the price point. Wheel support is confirmed on PC, though given the twitchy physics, a pad actually gives you more precision than you might expect from a game marketed around raw driving feel. The depth issues are real. There are 20-plus cars inspired by Eastern Bloc classics from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, each with acceleration, top speed, and steering stats, but most of them handle more similarly than the numbers suggest. Track variety does dry up faster than it should: the neon city blocks start blending together once the novelty fades. Story mode also locks you out of using your unlocked garage cars when starting a fresh profile, which is a strange design call that adds unnecessary friction. The developer has shown willingness to patch and update the game post-launch, which counts for something. For my core test of "is it fun for a group of friends on a Saturday night", the answer is a qualified yes, with caveats. Split-screen, pumping synthwave volume high, short races, and the boost colour-matching creating natural trash-talk moments. Casual players will struggle until they retrain their instincts for the twitchy steering. Anyone expecting polished arcade physics in the Burnout or OutRun tradition should adjust expectations significantly. The visual style and soundtrack are doing the heavy lifting throughout, and they do it with genuine flair.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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