TRAILBLAZERS Review for PlayStation 4

There are two basic kinds of racing games: sim racing and arcade racing. Sim racers focus their often impressive technology on delivering as authentic of a racing experience as possible. Physics, vehicles, weather, locations, and more are modeled after and constrained to the real world. At the other end of the spectrum the arcade racer tends to play fast and loose with the laws of physics, transporting you to worlds that are, by varying degrees of gameplay and setting, pure fantasy. Trailblazers, developed by Supergonk and published by Rising Star Games, zooms straight towards this arcade fantasy with full enthusiasm.

In brief, Trailblazers resembles the turbocharged racing series of F-Zero and WipeOut, with a dash of asymmetric gameplay a la Splatoon, and dresses itself with a vaguely Borderlands cel-shaded aesthetic. The characters and racetracks are colorful and exotic, often lighthearted but not quite as cute as Mario Kart. Trailblazers is a racing game where maintaining control of your car is never fully assured due to the extreme speeds you regularly achieve. There’s an added twist: vehicles can drop paint trails behind them which provide speed boosts when you drive over your color, or paint can be fired at opponents to make them spin out.

Part of Trailblazers’ pitch to gamers is that this painting mechanic allows for a unique kind of cooperative play. There are a few different ways to win here. You can aim for getting first place, but laying down a lot of paint for your teammates while covering opponents’ trails is effective, too. There are also bonus points for extending your boost multiplier by following allied paint trails closely. Your individual score isn’t as important as the total team score, which is what ultimately wins races in most cases. To further cement its multiplayer credentials, Trailblazers is also one of those rare modern games that still supports local multiplayer, offering split-screen for up to four players. It supports online split-screen, too, and cross-platform multiplayer with the PC version of the game.

I had fun with the variety of tracks and finding a balance between focusing on racing and laying paint behind me for the next lap. Some types of race disable your paint ability and involve driving through gates that drop paint for you. This kind of swapping between more standard races keeps the racing and the settings fresh. There’s really a lot of fun to be had here when the game is running on all cylinders and doesn’t get in the player’s way too much. There’s a clear amount of polish that went into Trailblazers before it landed on the marketplace that keeps it enjoyable even through some of the gameplay hiccups.

Performance is always crucial to how a racing game plays. In my time with Trailblazers, I never had the frame rate drop on me during a race. Sometimes it looked a bit choppy as the timer counted down to start, but once the races started things always stayed smooth. This is probably an illusion aided by the motion blurring the game uses, but it serves its purpose well here. Online multiplayer also seemed to function well, although there are always issues with latency depending on the types of Internet speed and connections other players have. More challenging was simply finding people online to race against at all. It’s hard for indie games to build an online community when there are so many others to compete with, but this is one worth taking advantage of, especially if you’re keen on a new racer.

The game is at its best when you’re able to embrace the high speeds it encourages you with, zooming along and narrowly avoiding crashing. This is unfortunately at odds with some other design decisions. For example, there’s no way to see an overlay of the current track while you’re racing. Most arcade racing games keep a minimap overlay available on screen for convenience, but not so here. Many of the F-Zero series’ tracks are much wider than what most other arcade racers feature in order to compensate for the challenge of making turns and adjustments while racing at extreme speeds. Trailblazers has several tracks that are designed with narrower lanes reminiscent of WipeOut, but the tracks also tend to have a lot more turns and obstacles while having a higher game speed.

Several of the tracks feel like they’re somewhat unbalanced: not enough visual cues on some to make the sheer turns correctly without memorization, sections where the pavement disappears and leaves you heading straight for some rocks or trees without a clear direction for where to continue next, or steep inclines combined with turns that prevent you from planning how to those upcoming turns. Others have abrupt lane merges, even going so far as being barely wider than your car. This would require precision at standard speed, nevermind blazing along with triple boost speeds where you have little time to decide how to approach the next stretch. There’s almost an occasional trial and error element at work. Some players, I imagine, will consider this to be part of the game’s intended challenge and embrace it. Others more like myself may find this undercuts the overall enjoyment to be had.

The single player mode is mostly a very long tutorial. In a game that revolves around the idea of cooperative and competitive racing, playing against the AI can only warm you up for human opponents. The campaign features a surprising amount of dialogue and a story revolving around the weird and colorful cast of characters that seemingly manage to solve all of their problems through racing. I’m conflicted over whether it’s a good thing or not that there’s such little voice acting to complement the large amount of dialogue text. What few utterances the characters do make each time a new dialogue starts (and randomly throughout races) are so cheesy and repetitive that it’s almost like a joke the developer is having at the player’s expense.

The characters bring little to the gameplay other than a different looking car and minor tweaks to their vehicle stats. It’s a huge missed opportunity that none of the cast have any other unique abilities with which to show off. Some character-specific paint powers would add to the game’s appeal and distinguish the cast beyond their appearances. Do you want to play as the robot or the tree frog? Maybe the cheerful girl with the funny space helmet who looks like she could star in a 1950’s Buck Rogers comic? As it stands, these are the only questions you need to ask yourself. It’s all about the fluff you like.

Trailblazers does several things right and presents itself well. It never quite reaches the greatness it could achieve, but if you’re searching for a new arcade racer this game has you covered on all the bases and then some.

Score: 7/10

Check Out the Trailblazers Launch Trailer:

Trailblazers is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam.