Total Arcade Racing

I organise Saturday night racing sessions for a living (metaphorically), and the first question I always ask about a local multiplayer racer is: how many warm bodies does it actually need to be fun? For Total Arcade Racing, the honest answer is at least three, ideally four or more. Fire it up solo and the cracks show fast - the AI is predictable, refuses to use shortcuts on circuits that sometimes have genuinely clever shortcut routes, and barely touches the rechargeable boost that you will be leaning on constantly. You will lap half the field by lap three of a four-lap race. That is not thrilling. Get real humans in the room, though, and the picture changes. The game runs all nine modes on a single shared screen - no split-screen juggling, no complicated setup, everything zoomed out so every tiny car is visible at once. The mode list is genuinely varied: standard Arcade Race, Championship, Time Trial with ghost replays, Elimination (last place gets cut each lap), Endless, Demolition Derby, Survivor (an endlessly scrolling upward gauntlet through oncoming traffic), Delivery (race to grab a box, tow it on a rope to the drop zone while rivals knock it loose), and Car Hockey, which is basically a stripped-down top-down Rocket League. Seven cars with A-to-C class rankings offer some handling variation - faster A-class vehicles are slippery and demand real brake discipline on tighter circuits, while C-class cars are forgiving enough for complete beginners to stay competitive. Controller support is solid and the keyboard-up-to-four-players option is a nice touch for the laptop-at-a-party crowd. There is no online multiplayer in the traditional matchmaking sense, but the Steam version supports Remote Play Together for up to eight players, which extends the couch-chaos concept to friends who are not in the room. Global leaderboards add a time trial hook for solo sessions, and ghost replay support means you actually have something to race against when grinding for stars to unlock new tracks and cars. The visual style sits firmly in primary-colour carpet-toybox territory - do not come expecting atmosphere or depth of artistic direction, because there is none. A handful of reviewers flagged the handling as occasionally unwieldy, particularly on Xbox, and that is a fair note: the steering has a slight floatiness that takes a few sessions to read properly, so your first night with four newcomers may involve a lot of hairpin pile-ups. That can be funny, or it can be frustrating, depending entirely on the crowd. Who is this for? Honestly, it is for the group that wants something everyone can play in under sixty seconds of explanation, something that does not require a racing wheel or any genre knowledge, and something cheap enough that it feels like zero risk. It sits comfortably alongside Micro Machines-era nostalgia without truly matching the best modern interpretations of the formula. Solo players will run out of meaningful challenge quickly, and anyone hunting a deep single-player progression loop should look elsewhere. But for the right Saturday night scenario - controllers in hand, snacks on the table, four to eight people who just want to scream at a screen - this delivers exactly what it advertises.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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