I picked up Phantom Spark after seeing every dutch gamedev tweeting about it lol
it's fun but man I somehow cannot wrap my head around the handling model. I realize the answer is probably Git Gud but like the relationship between speed and turning radius just feels fuckin Incomprehensible. The whole game is clearly designed around precision braking; all the turns are too tight to take at speed, and it's not like trackmania where you can eventually work out a perfect line that never decelerates once you learn the track well enough
visually it LOOKS like an f-zero or a trackmania but the design seems much closer to like a sim racer where everything is Mostly About Braking. But the brakes are incredibly twitchy and something about the relationship between brakes/turning/acceleration just feels unknowable. There are tracks that consist of literally one turn and it feels completely impossible to even land CONSISTENT lines through them, let alone actually beat the challenge times. I can spend an hour on one track and never hit a turn the same way twice
again, I'm aware "git gud" is the null hypothesis but like, I never had this problem in f-zero or trackmania or burnout or distance or whatever. So I dunno, feels like there's SOMETHING uniquely weird about this game. Don't wanna be like "boo this sucks" or anything but I really can't figure out what the designers are going for here