Mini Racing World

My first thought when loading up Mini Racing World was that someone finally made the little top-down racer I used to doodle in my school notebook. Kitty In A Box is a solo-dev outfit, and this is their debut, so temper expectations accordingly, but the bones here are genuinely fun. You get a career carved into seasons, a small open-world hub you drive around to reach events and your garage, and a roster of 18 vehicles, each with a distinct handling flavour. The visual style is chunky, low-poly, and bright enough to run on basically any PC at 60fps without breaking a sweat. On the track, the driving model is arcade through and through. Accelerate, steer, brake, drift, spin, and nitro cover the full input set, and the controls feel tight once you get a few corners in. Turns need a bit of anticipation, but the game rewards that foresight rather than punishing you for it. There are two core event types: Circuit races against AI opponents, and Minikhana, a stunt-scoring mode where you rack up points by drifting, jumping, and flipping your car before the timer runs out. The Minikhana mode is the more original of the two and the better stress-reliever. Circuit races are solid, though some players have flagged that late-career AI can feel rubber-banded and the speed ceiling on fully upgraded cars gets outpaced by opponents in certain duel events, a balancing rough edge worth knowing about. Car customisation covers both aesthetics and performance. You swap out spoilers, exhausts, wheels, and paint, and you upgrade components using credits earned from events. New cars are bought the same way, so there is a decent grind-and-unlock loop keeping you clicking forward through the seasons. It is not deep by any sim or RPG standard, but for a sub-five-dollar indie it threads the needle between "pointlessly shallow" and "overwhelming spreadsheet." Now the honest warnings, because this is where I have to put my co-op hat on: there is no split-screen, no local multiplayer, and no online multiplayer in any form that is officially supported at launch. The Steam community page had players asking for 3-4 player couch support back at release, and that feature never arrived. Controller support is listed as partial, and a handful of players reported that PS5 and Xbox pads needed workarounds to function properly. If your Saturday night plan involves four people on one screen, this is the wrong game. If it is a solo wind-down racer or something for a younger family member who just wants to collect toy cars and win seasons, it actually fits the bill quite well. Think of it as a lighter, more accessible spiritual cousin to Art of Rally, no historical framing, less mechanical depth, but a comparable visual identity and a similarly chill loop. Riley, Scout Team

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