Trailblazers

My first thought firing up Trailblazers was "who let someone mix Splatoon DNA into a futuristic hover-racer, and why did it take this long?" The core hook is genuinely clever: you lay colour trails behind your anti-gravity car, and every inch of your team's paint that you glide over charges your boost. Paint the best corners, and your teammates behind you are riding a free speed highway. Let the enemy repaint those corners, and suddenly you are the one grinding through molasses. It is the kind of mechanic that makes a casual spectator at the couch lean in and say "wait, what just happened?" The modes give you a fair amount to work with. Team Racing puts two squads of three against each other in a points race where finishing position is only part of the equation, drifting, boosting, and painting all feed the scoreboard. Partner Battle tightens that to three teams of two, where strategy becomes everything. Gate Chase mixes it up further by removing manual painting entirely, forcing you to hit gates that spray colour onto the track automatically. There is also a 20-chapter Story Mode that walks you through all eight characters, each with unique vehicle stats built around speed versus paint capacity trade-offs, and challenge objectives that go well beyond "finish first". Locally, up to four players can play split-screen, and online supports up to six with cross-platform matchmaking included. For couch co-op nights, this is genuinely where Trailblazers shines brightest. Dividing painting and boosting duties between two friends sitting on the same sofa, shouting about who needs to cover the left chicane, is exactly the kind of chaotic fun the game was built for. If racing is not your strong suit, you can hang back and focus purely on flooding the track with your team's colour, setting faster teammates up for big boost chains. That role flexibility is a thoughtful accessibility touch that most arcade racers do not bother with. Here is where I have to be straight with you though. The technical side has problems that reviewers flagged at launch and that have not been magically solved by time. Frame rate takes hits as paint coverage on the track increases, and for a game where reading the track surface in real time is the whole point, that stings. Wall collisions drain momentum in a way that feels punitive rather than physics-based, and the AI teammates in solo play have a poor grasp of what cooperation means, often ignoring the painting strategy entirely. Online matchmaking was a ghost town close to launch and, being a smaller indie release from 2018, those lobbies are not filling up any faster today. The honest answer is that online mode is essentially dead, which leaves you with the story, custom races, and local play. If you have a group to bring to the couch, the local mode earns its keep. If you are shopping for a solo experience or active online lobbies, manage your expectations. The presentation holds up well regardless. Ten base tracks across desert, forest, beach, and city settings each run forwards, mirrored, reversed, and reversed-mirrored, giving you 40 race configurations in total. The cel-shaded art style, with its bright Borderlands-adjacent colour palette, still pops, and the electronic soundtrack from indie artists keeps the energy up through every lap. Trailblazers is a genuinely original idea that a tiny three-person studio executed with real heart, but it needed more development time to iron out the physics and frame rate, and a bigger playerbase to make online worth launching.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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