Speed Kills

My first thought booting up Speed Kills was: finally, someone remembered that top-down combat racing used to be a thing. The isometric sci-fi setting, the galaxy-spanning championship structure, the chunky vehicles firing rockets and dropping mines behind them. All the right ingredients. Then I spent the next two hours watching those ingredients fail to combine into anything that truly sticks. The game has you working up from a dustbowl wasteland planet in a battered monster truck, grinding race winnings to upgrade your ride and eventually unlock sportscars and antigrav hovercrafts. There are three vehicle classes in total, eight cars spread across them, and each comes pre-fitted with a fixed weapon loadout. Missiles, lasers, mines, sticky goo puddles, manual nitro boosts. The combat toolkit sounds decent on paper. The problem is you cannot swap weapons between cars, you cannot meaningfully tweak handling, and the upgrade system boils down to buying a better engine (which auto-adds to either acceleration or top speed) or padding out your armor and ammo capacity. That is the full depth of it. Compared to the Death Rally lineage it clearly wants to inherit, that feels like a skeleton of a progression system rather than a complete one. Race-to-race, there is genuine fun buried in here. Speed boosts picked up off the track create chaotic little moments, the AI will happily spin you out with a well-timed bump, and the Unreal Engine 4 visuals hold up well enough for the scope. Each of the five planets has its own environmental personality, from nuclear wastelands and criminal-controlled urban decay to the neon-lit capital circuits of Trantorus. The track variety across 50-plus layouts keeps things visually fresh. But the collision physics feel inconsistent rather than tactile, and once your car is upgraded past the early grind wall the AI stops being a real threat. Some races run only two laps, which is over before you have settled into any rhythm. The biggest miss, and the one that genuinely stings for a game built around chaotic vehicular combat, is the complete absence of multiplayer. No online, no local split-screen, nothing. As someone who rates couch chaos as a core review criterion, that absence is not a footnote. It is the whole story. Speed Kills is crying out for a friend to race against, and the developers shipped it without one. The Steam community has also flagged broken achievements and controller support that does not fully live up to what the store page advertises. The game appears to have been effectively abandoned post-launch with no meaningful patches addressing these complaints. If you are hunting for the spiritual successor to Rock 'n Roll Racing or the old Micro Machines school of isometric combat, Speed Kills brushes close enough to scratch the itch for a few hours. But with no multiplayer, thin upgrade depth, inconsistent physics, and a development team that went quiet fast, the honest verdict is that better options in this genre are not hard to find.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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