Hotshot Racing

My first thought booting Hotshot Racing was straightforward delight: here is a PC arcade racer that actually supports four-player split-screen, and that alone puts it in rare company. The low-poly, hyper-colourful aesthetic is an unabashed love letter to the Sega Rally and Virtua Racing era, and it lands. Tracks set across coastal, jungle, alpine, and Las Vegas desert environments pop with vivid colour, and the whole thing runs at a locked 60FPS in single-player that makes the speed feel genuinely physical. If you grew up feeding coins into Daytona USA cabinets or grinding through Ridge Racer on a first-gen PlayStation, there is a very specific dopamine hit waiting for you here. The core loop is drift-to-boost, and it takes a proper learning curve to click. You tap the brake mid-corner to initiate a slide, then wrestle the back end with the left stick. Nail it and you feed a boost meter split into four chunks, which you can spend for a burst of speed down the next straight. Slipstreaming also charges boost, so pack racing is rewarded. Pick your driver carefully: each of the eight characters (Keiko, Xing, Marcus, Viktor, and the rest) comes with four cars tuned toward different stat priorities, whether that is top speed, acceleration, or drift angle. The balanced cars are the best entry point for newcomers; the high-drift options are for players who want to feel like they are perpetually on the edge of control. Where Hotshot Racing gets messier is the AI. Rubber-banding on Expert difficulty is aggressive enough to feel punitive rather than competitive, and the CPU drivers will happily shunt you into a wall mid-drift to reclaim a position. It is the kind of behaviour that gets loud complaints from the couch, which can cut either way depending on your group's temperament. The extra modes, Cops and Robbers and Drive or Explode, are chaotic fun in short bursts but neither has the mechanical depth to sustain long sessions. Drive or Explode (stay above the minimum speed or your car detonates, with that threshold climbing each checkpoint) is genuinely tense the first few times. Cops and Robbers is enjoyable chaos that becomes confusing about who is actually winning. Both modes are available in split-screen and eight-player online, which is the right call. Solo longevity is the honest weak point. There are sixteen base tracks across four cups in Grand Prix mode (the free Big Boss Bundle DLC added a few more), and you will cycle through them quickly. Cosmetic unlocks via in-race earnings give you something to chase, covering body parts, paint jobs, and driver outfits, but there is no career structure or story mode to anchor a solo run. The online player base on PC has thinned out since launch, so finding populated lobbies requires some scheduling with friends. That is fine if you treat this as a couch game first, which you should. As a "four controllers, Saturday night" game, it absolutely delivers. As a game you plan to sink a hundred solo hours into, it does not. For wheel and pedal users, do not expect a simulation setup to give you an edge here. This is a gamepad game through and through, and the brake-tap drift mechanic works best on an analogue stick. A standard controller is the correct tool, and accessibility is one of Hotshot Racing's genuine strengths: the handling model is approachable enough that a non-gamer can be competitive within a race or two, which is exactly what you want when the fourth player is your partner who "doesn't really play games."

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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