Xenon Racer

My Saturday night co-op radar went up the moment I saw Xenon Racer had split-screen and online multiplayer in the same package. A futuristic drift racer with neon cars, Monstercat EDM on the soundtrack, and tracks set in Tokyo, Dubai, and beyond? That pitch lands. Then you actually start driving, and the gap between the pitch and the product becomes pretty obvious pretty fast. The core loop is drift-to-boost, plain and simple. Every corner is an invitation to brake-tap, throw the rear out, hold the slide, and fill your Xenon boost bar. Nail it and you feel genuinely slick. The cars, designed by a real-world consultant who has worked with Ferrari, are the game's undisputed high point: each one handles differently, with some being loose and easy to over-rotate while others need early, deliberate turn-in. That variety is real and worth appreciating. The problem is that the window for a clean drift is brutally narrow. The game wants constant drifting but does a poor job of teaching the precise brake-tap timing required. If the sequence is slightly off you either plough into the wall or crawl through the corner while the AI swarms past. On PC the controls feel more responsive than on console versions, and a gamepad is strongly recommended over keyboard - the analogue input makes a meaningful difference when you are trying to modulate that drift angle at 200-plus km/h. Difficulty is the other big sticking point. The AI ramps up hard and fast, and even the lower difficulty settings can feel disproportionately punishing. The career mode runs through the Xenon Racing Championship across seven global locations, with Grand Prix events, time trials, and an Edge Mode for players who want an extra punishment bracket. There is somewhere between eight and ten hours of content in the championship alone if you grind through it, and a car customisation system that lets you tune parts for specific track layouts adds a layer of pre-race planning that rewards the patient. The track designs themselves, though, get repetitive - lots of gentle straights followed by sharp right-angle turns, and the city environments lack the visual energy the car designs deserve. For the four-friends-on-a-couch question: split-screen is here, but it is two players only with no AI filling the grid. Online lobbies were sparse at launch and player counts have only dropped since. The Monstercat soundtrack is genuinely fun and fits the vibe, though engine audio can drown it out if you do not manually balance the mix. Steering wheel support covers Thrustmaster, Logitech, and Fanatec hardware, so if you have a wheel setup gathering dust this is worth a quick test session - the drift mechanic actually clicks a bit faster with analogue pedal input. Xenon Racer is the kind of game that flashes potential for the first few races, then starts revealing the rough edges. It is not broken on PC the way it was on certain console ports at launch, and there is a specific type of arcade-racer obsessive who will grind the championship until the drift timing becomes muscle memory and then genuinely enjoy it. For everyone else, the frustration outpaces the satisfaction too often to call it a confident recommendation at anything above a deep discount.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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