I played for a couple of hours, managed to breeze through the tutorial relatively easily, managed to ace the first championship and even unlocked the first Chaos Emerald... and I still have no idea how you're supposed to keep up with the deluge of information that you constantly need to parse pretty much all the time during every race.
I refuse to believe that any sane development team, free from the tyranny of corporate-mandated release dates and other such malarkey, would spend so many years developing and releasing a game knowing that the mechanics are bad. So there logically has to be a really, really good game buried beneath all of the perpetual information overload...
But, man... even as someone who learned how to speedrun the first two acts of Ultrakill last year — which is also a game that demands a lot of mechanical juggling and situational awareness from the player — I don't think I have it in me to learn how to see through Ring Racer's perpetual information overload. I really, really don't know how to feel about that.
EDIT 4/26: corrected some major oversights. My opinion remains unchanged, however.
After speaking with someone else who has managed to derive an entire day's worth of enjoyment from Ring Racers and trying to gain an understanding of their perspective on the game, I sat down and played it again for another hour or so.
It didn't go well.
I really don't want to say that I hate this game. I really don't want to say that the physical sensation of losing speed just from drifting or going up a mild incline feels absolutely awful. I really don't want to say that assigning items and ring-burning to the same button — which renders your most important source of speed unusable just by holding an item — is a terrible design decision that should have been vetoed years ago. I really don't want to say that the forced tutorial is so awful that it actively makes you worse at the game than if you had just jumped in blindly. I really don't want to say that the mountain of needlessly complicated mechanics rarely, if ever, contributes anything other than confusion or frustration to the overall experience. I really don't want to say that the only people Ring Racers is meant for are the people who've already sunk hundreds of hours playing top-level SRB2K competitive multiplayer.
But if I don't say any of the above, then I'd be lying to you.
I hate admitting that this game infuriates me to such a degree that even just thinking about it depresses me. I'm deeply, deeply envious of everyone who has managed to find the good buried beneath all of the bad. I've uninstalled it from my computer just for the sake of my own attitude. And, God willing, I'd like to not think about it again for at least the next several years.
I didn't think I'd be back here again so soon. I'd have never imagined that a patch designed to alleviate the worst of the game's launch issues would leave me feeling even more sour than before. I honestly really wish I could just stick to my initial judgement of this Sonic-themed DOOM mod and go back to playing more ULTRAKILL and/or Balatro. But I let my morbid curiosity get the better of me and now I'm vomiting up words on the internet again.
Before I start listing off all of my grievances, I want to make one thing clear: I was able to play the game for several hours with the game only fighting against me most of the time instead of all of the time. It turns out that there truly is an absolutely incredible racing game buried underneath all of the bloat — it's just that the game keeps choosing to be mediocre.
The vast majority of the changes made in this patch were designed to quell the loudest complaints about the sheer length of the tutorial and the glacial pace at which content is unlocked. With few exceptions, these are all surface-level changes that fail to address the underlying game design problems which the unsatisfying unlocks and bad tutorial are merely symptoms of. That is to say, the driving physics still feel wrong. More specifically...
You still need to burn rings to accomplish basically anything, which makes picking up items a universal detriment no matter the circumstances; you still bleed disproportionate amounts of speed just from drifting or going up mild inclines; the fastfall technique ends by making your character bounce, which, due to the ways that levels are designed around it, takes away control exactly when you need it most; and the trick jumps are... honestly, I could write an entire separate post tearing into everything wrong with the trick jumps.
There is no way in hell that the devs could address every single one of these problems in a minuscule 48 hours. So of course the patch is going to be a band-aid fix while they work on fixing the underlying problems.
... they are working on fixing the underlying problems, right?
Author's note: the rest of this post is not a review, and can be safely ignored if all you care about is whether the game is good or not.
Turns out that you can't fix fundamentally bad game design by tweaking the underlying numbers.
Before I say anything else, I want to make it explicitly clear that Kart Krew have made genuine improvements to the game. Far and away the most important improvement has been the nerfing of slopes, which now feel significantly less awful to try and climb. Furthermore, CPU rubberbanding has been significantly reined in thanks to a series of AI bugfixes; the glacial speed of content unlocks has been sped up slightly more; trick jumps are about half as likely to be trial-and-error beginner's traps; and multiple far-too-small tracks have been up-scaled by 20%.
By all rights, I should be singing praises about how the developers are actually taking all of their game's criticisms seriously and taking steps to fix or remove the extraneous crap nobody asked for. So then why the hell aren't I doing that?
To make a long story short: rather than fess up and admit that the whole "Ring Burning" mechanic is needlessly complex for no other reason than to artificially inflate their own perception of game's mechanical... ahem... "depth", they've instead doubled down and added an accessibility option that makes the game automatically burn rings for you whenever it decides that it would be in your best interest to do so.
Why go to such extreme lengths to keep this mechanic in the game when the big highlight of the patch is the ability to activate a poor man's workaround? Why commit so hard to contrived mechanical bloat that is clearly unpopular with all but a tiny handful of the most die-hard DRRR sycophants?
Unfortunately for both you and I, there are still more problems that I feel compelled to whine about. Taking a hit still forces you into a state of being unable to control your vehicle until you come to a dead stop, no matter how long you spend being flung halfway into the stratosphere because you got hit by a homing missile while taking a mandatory jump or half-pipe, or how many times you get repeatedly rammed over and over again by every other driver in the race after taking a hit. The game still actively encourages behavior that can only be described as griefing during the pre-race countdown — hell, the patch even actively doubles down on this. The unlock-everything cheats still don't unlock Hidden Palace Zone, for reasons that I have given up trying to understand.
And perhaps most damning of all: it is still painfully obvious that the lower speed settings were not meant to exist, and were only tossed in at the last second due to the fact that several maps are either borderline unplayable or literally unplayable on anything other than the highest (and thus "correct") speed setting.
I didn't want to end this post on a disappointing note as I've done the last three times I've talked about this game, but between 1) the fact that every surface-level fix that gets pushed out with each patch just reveals ever-deeper core design problems; and 2) the bad taste left in my mouth from Kart Krew's thinly-veiled contempt for their own players as outlined in my v2.1 patch impressions...
Well, I'd reckon that my dismal outlook on this game's prospects is blatantly obvious at this point.
I have nothing new to say about this update. I've already outlined all of my criticisms in my previous write-ups; any further complaints simply aren't worthwhile at this point in time.
Truth be told, I've been trying not to think about this Sonic-themed DOOM mod at all, because the blasted thing's been giving me... something akin to a minor existential crisis.
I want to make video games (big surprise). Racing games are my favorite genre. Combine these two aspects of myself together, and it's not illogical to assume that I'd have a pretty good grasp on what makes a good racing game... right? Right???