I Think I was Wrong About Screamer
A while back, I wrote about my very early impressions on Screamer.
I think I might have jumped the gun on that.
HokiHoshi's latest dives into the twin-stick racing game, along with Aenore's critiques of the game being valid yet rather small ones - at least when compared to the kinds of criticisms levied against most arcade racers of the current era - have opened my mind quite a lot.
My initial impression was to expect an experience similar to Inertial Drift, but it seems I've GRAVELY underestimated the amount of polish and shine a bigger budget can heave upon a game's experience. With an indie title, a particular mindset has to be adopted in the interest of fairness - smaller budgets mean smaller scopes, smaller experiences, but more innovative ideas. Milestone isn't exactly independent. Now, that's not to say my underestimation was entirely unfounded; the Hot Wheels Unleashed games were fun to play, but there really wasn't much to them. They were likeable games with a fantastic creative direction to them, but it wasn't anything I could say I'd sink my teeth into. It never hooked me.
Screamer, on the other hand, seems to be the type of game that'd tie me up in all kinds of ways. Let's get into it.
First of all, the story mode. According to Hoki, the campaign is long enough to sink one's teeth into, with many characters to love, or love to hate. While not many specifics were revealed, I find myself wanting to avoid spoilers. The character designs look great, with enough variety and uniqueness to each team and character to tell them apart. While I do worry about the limitations in environments, it's not unfamiliar territory to me - many heralded racing games of the past had to reuse tracks and layouts, and some even cheaply stretched their track list by reversing or even mirroring them. Some mirrored layouts would even feature mirrored textures, as if the budget had run so thin that the team hadn't the money nor time to do more than click the "horizontal flip" button in their dev toolkit. So, from the complaints I've seen, they're quite nitpicky. Absence of massive problems is promising to me, considering the rotting state of racing games these days.
Second, Photo Mode. It isn't slapped on as an afterthought, it's well implemented with lots of adjustments to make. Standard camera yaw, pitch, roll, pan and zoom is there for the exact position you want, along with essential settings like exposure, contrast, brightness, gamma and saturation. However, there are quite a few nice additions for post-processing effects! Lens dirt, filters, aspect ratios, rendered motion blur, camera motion controls that can hook the camera to your car or stay still when motion blur is rendered, depth of field settings... the sky really seems to be the limit here, and it's awesome to see! This might not seem like a big deal to some people, but a good photo mode is quite important to me. As a glitch artist, this game's aesthetics pair nicely with my preferred post-shot approach. I can't wait to see what kind of shots I can make with rendered screenies from that game.
On the topic of aesthetics, holy shit this game looks gorgeous. Its artistic direction already impressed me, but the style has only further solidified and beautified as time went on. Hoki's comparison to Ridge Racer is apt, but not the full story; the cars, characters and the world have this particular futuristic flair to them that I have absolutely fallen in love with. I've been fooled by this kind of style before with Marathon, but I already knew extraction shooters just aren't my thing. I'm willing to put up with quite a lot to try enjoying a racing game; it's why Prostreet is still my favorite Need for Speed entry out of the entire franchise.
So, the driving. Have I changed my mind on that? Well.... yeah.
Once again, Hoki's dissection gives a lot of promise for me. I know his perspective enough to know where he and I stand on certain aspects of racing games, so I'm able to gauge how I'd feel pretty well when I take in his thoughts. The presence of driving assists, the ability to switch to single-stick driving (huge), and his description of the car handling and required precision is perking my ears. Inertial Drift felt super twitchy and responsive, but I have a sense that its responsiveness may have been a detriment to my experience by giving me a little too much confidence heading into corners. Screamer seems to have a nice balance of wide roads, technical sections and smooth handling that might just make the gameplay click for me. My only hesitation is a critique Aenore had in aer thread, which points to "cheaty" opponents that feel too quick on the straights but too slow in the corners. Pretty much every racing game has this problem - even iRacing, despite their service having the best CPU opponent experience in racing games in my opinion - but it's at least understandable to see that problem here in such an innovative style of racing. Frustrating, but not unprecedented.
An issue I'd previously brought up was with the complicated offense/defense system, labeled as Hype and Sync respectively if I'm recalling correctly. According to Hoki, the game takes its sweet time introducing the player to the energy system. Hoki comments that it took until halfway through the game before offensive options became accessible, if I remember right, but it seems like a welcome pace for that system. Given my lack of experience with car combat systems, having that extra time to get acclimated - both to the handling and the battle systems - will be very welcome. I can tend to be a bit of a slow learner at times.
So, I think I might have been very wrong about this game. Of course, given the recent betrayal I experienced with Marathon, I'm still quite concerned I might be getting pulled in by my eyes just to get junked by its mechanics ten hours in. But Marathon is different; I already knew I didn't like extraction shooters generally and I didn't trust my gut. I love racing games, and I've been BEGGING for a shot of inspiration and innovation in the genre I love the most. My gut's telling me that Screamer might be a different story.
Milestone seems to be doing a lot of things right, and they even pulled some sim racing pals into the fold. I feel like I'd be doing myself a disservice by avoiding their new game.