Fireburst

My honest reaction after an hour with Fireburst was something like: whoever thought of making your boost and your weapon the same meter was onto something real. You hold the Fireboost, your car heats up, you go faster, and sustained heat either fries nearby opponents or detonates your own car if you push too long. Hunting for water barrels and cool-down pools mid-race to keep that heat meter in check adds a layer of spatial awareness you do not expect from a budget arcade racer. The four car types each use the heat differently: Fireball cars become a rolling explosion on contact, Fireblast cars shoot flames sideways, Firewall cars lay a trail of fire behind them, and Firewheels are more of a defensive trap-layer. On paper, that is a smart foundation. In practice, the whole thing collapses quickly once you look past that mechanic. The 12 single-player tracks sit across varied settings, docks, airfields, oil rigs, sewers, and the multi-path layouts are genuinely well-designed. But the character stat system is essentially decorative. Picking the fast car or the heat-resistant build changes numbers on a screen without meaningfully changing how races play out. The unlock challenges, meant to gate the full roster of 16 characters and vehicles, are mostly dull objectives wrapped around repetitive AI races rather than anything designed to teach or thrill. Destruction Mode, where you race to 10 kills instead of a finish line, is the most spirited thing the solo game offers, and even that wears thin after two sessions. Now, the multiplayer question, which for me is always the real question with a couch-adjacent arcade racer. The split-screen answer is messy. Up to four players can join locally, and the Race and Destruction modes are both present. But there are no AI bots to fill empty slots in local play, performance takes a visible hit in split-screen, and configuring controls for the second player is reportedly buried in a text file rather than an options menu. That is not a great night for four people who just want to blow each other up. Online eight-player racing exists too, but the servers were dead at launch and have not recovered. You will only get anything out of online if you are organising a private lobby with friends you have already corralled. From a hardware side, this is pure gamepad territory. Wheel support is not a consideration here, nor should it be. The controls are tight enough with a pad, and the braking is binary, fully on or nothing, which feels intentional for an arcade brawler but can frustrate players used to any finesse. Built on Unreal Engine 3, the visuals were praised at launch for their fire effects and track lighting, though texture pop-in and frame-rate dips in split-screen undercut the presentation. The voice acting is uniformly awful in a low-budget way that some players will find charming and others will mute inside the first race. Fireburst sits at a Metacritic 59 on PC, and that score is honest. The central boost-as-weapon concept earns genuine respect, but the game built around it is too thin to hold up solo and too technically rough to be the reliable couch-party pick it wants to be. If the price is low enough and you have three friends physically in the room, Destruction Mode might spark an enjoyable half-hour. Solo, there is almost nothing here that a better game in the genre does not do with more depth and less frustration.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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