Bang Bang Racing

My Saturday night co-op radar lit up the moment I loaded Bang Bang Racing. Four people crammed around a monitor, chunky chibi cars pile-driving each other into the first corner of a colorful Japanese cherry-blossom circuit, everyone screaming about who drove into whose side. For that opening thirty minutes, it genuinely delivers. The question is what happens after. The setup is clean and approachable. Controls come down to throttle, brake, steer, and a nitro boost, and anyone can be competitive within two races. There are four car classes to work through: N-Dura muscle cars, Evo GT stock cars, Protech endurance racers, and the Apex open-wheel formula cars. Each class gets progressively quicker, and within each class you pick from five variants tuned toward handling, top speed, toughness, acceleration, or nitro output. The handling and top-speed builds feel the most useful in practice; the toughness variants are a harder sell when explosive barrels and physical contact rarely decide races the way you might hope. Career mode runs you through standard races, time trials, elimination rounds (last place gets cut each lap until one car remains, genuinely tense stuff), and championship point tallies. You can replay individual races mid-championship without restarting from scratch, which is a small but welcome quality-of-life touch. Free Play lets you dial in track, laps, class, and AI difficulty at will, and anything you unlock in career carries over. The nine circuits are reversible and can be modified with shortcuts, which stretches the track count further than it sounds. The art is bright and well-composed, from the harbour-side Palm Coast layout to the stadium-set Layton Raceway. Obstacle scatter, including cones, water barrels, tar drums, sand strips, and oil slicks, changes the drivable surface and keeps your eyes moving. On paper, this is exactly the couch-racing package you want. In practice, two things drag it back. First, the camera: the dynamic mode swings nauseatingly every time you turn, and the fixed side angle makes judging your line weirdly difficult. Stick to the fixed top-down camera from the start and just live with its limitations, because the chase camera borders on unplayable at speed. Second, the solo game runs dry fast. The career clocks out around two to three hours, and with only nine base tracks, the repetition sets in before the credits roll. The AI in the early cups clusters into first-corner pile-ups with no apparent logic, and the difficulty curve does not feel meaningfully steeper as the classes progress. The big red flag for anyone buying this primarily as a PC game: there is no online multiplayer. Split-screen is local only and requires controllers around one machine, which is exactly how I want to play it on a Saturday night, but rules it out for anyone hoping to run sessions with friends remotely. Steam Remote Play Together is also not supported, which stings in an era where that would have extended the game's life considerably. If you have warm bodies and controllers available, Bang Bang Racing is a loud, fun, low-stakes party racer with a short burn time. If you are flying solo or playing online, the career will feel thin and the loop will not hold long enough to justify much attention. Riley, Scout Team