PACER Review for PlayStation 4

Pacer is a high-octane, adrenaline-fueled combat racing game that is sure to test your piloting skills. Developed and published by R8 Games, Pacer is an exciting, intense game that is a spiritual successor to the futuristic anti-gravity racing video game, Wipeout. Compete in deadly racing tournaments around the futuristic globe in style. 

The game offers 14 diverse race tracks that take place in unique futuristic versions of locations in real life, such as the Niagara Falls and South Africa, or in imagined locations like El Muro, an impoverished, dystopian slum city. Each race track has options to be played in reverse, mirrored, and either during the day or the night. Each track is also lovingly decorated with background details like creative, fake advertising and graffiti on walls, which helps make the player feel immersed in the role of a racer and makes the world feel more alive. There are lots of different game modes to try out. Each game mode provides fun twists to racing, helps improve your speed times, or has a different game objective entirely, such as Destruction, the game mode where the only objective is to destroy or be destroyed. 

One of my favorite features in Pacer is the Garage, where you can go to customize whichever ship you like however you want. Pacer uses credits as an in-game currency, which you acquire by playing the game. You can exchange your credits to buy new race tracks, acquire cosmetic enhancements for your ships, purchase different parts for your ship that affect its performance, or upgrade and modify for your favorite weapons. From what I can tell, the customization level of this game is fun and does help you, however, it is surprisingly balanced.

The graphic and audio designers took full advantage of the game’s futuristic theme and setting. Each race track has colorful animated neon signs that can be seen everywhere, and the ships have rad colorful light streaks that trail behind them. The music is electrifying and does a great job amping up the player. Fortunately, I believe the graphics and audio only made my experience that much more pleasurable.

As good of a game this is, it does have a few shortcomings. Pacer’s campaign is a great addition and includes different teams that you join and race for. Sadly, these race teams are barely memorable and could have been branded better into the backgrounds of race tracks or there could have been a background story. The campaign also locks each race into a certain difficulty and casual gamers will have an exceedingly difficult time progressing in later races. I also think the menus could use a tune-up and could be a little more animated. I also encountered a few bugs that caused two different menus to stack and I was forced to restart the game twice. The game also crashed 3 times while I reviewed it, I hope this is not typical. 

Pacer is definitely one of the better futuristic anti-gravity racing games available on the market. There are a few hiccups that hinder this game, but R8 Games have proven to be ambitious and can fix these issues in later updates. Most importantly, Pacer is fun. 

Rate: 7.5/10 

Check Out the Pacer PS4 Trailer: 

For more information, please visit: https://pacergame.com/ 

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Andrew Santacruz

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For most of my life, I have had the great fortune and pleasure of experiencing hundreds of different video game franchises and genres. Some of my all-time favorite titles are The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls, and Banjo-Kazooie. I have always played video games with the goal of having a good time.

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