It isn’t helped by some rather bland design choices and the kind of minor technical issue that pop up all over the game. For the most part, it falls into a strange halfway house. The almost Firewatch-style aesthetic isn’t without its charm, but for the most part, it’s neither arcadey enough to match the simplistic blue sky beauty of a SEGA racer and far from detailed enough to exist in the same bracket as Forza Horizon and the like.
The visuals, despite the occasional moment of beauty are, for lack of a better term, budget. This is an arcade racer in the more traditional sense of the term, and perhaps that, above all else, is why I have found myself in such an oddly forgiving mood.Īnd you really do have to be forgiving as, as oddly compelling as it might be, there is no getting around that fact that this is a fundamentally ropey video game experience. No, Moto Racer 4 is a proper arcade racer ala Burnout before it went all Paradise on us – closed tracks, star-based challenges, basic design. Sure, we have Need for Speed (most years) and Forza Horizon to scratch that arcade racer itch, but come on, as great as they are (and they are great), they’re not arcade racers in the traditional sense – they’re modern day, all singing, all dancing racers with slightly ‘arcadey’ handling. Perhaps it’s the arcade sensibilities that won me over. I appreciate that I had to for the review, but at no point did this feel like a slog – review or not, I was playing this game because I wanted to. I say ‘kind of’ as there are moments of horrendous infuriation, but you know what, I kept playing….and playing….and playing. Yes, Moto Racer 4 is not a great game, and while I would never suggest that anyone rush out to pick it up, I can honestly say that, despite my better judgement, I did kind of enjoy it. The visuals are inconsistent, the handling is awkward, it’s buggy and it’s imbalanced, but despite the myriad of issues, the kind that would immediately sink the vast majority of other video games, Moto Racer 4 manages to overcome this litany of technical problems and poor design choices to be, well….kind of enjoyable. Can a video game be fundamentally terrible and yet still enjoyable? There are plenty of movies out there in the ‘so good that they’re bad’ category, but due to the interactive nature of the medium and the importance of solid mechanics, such examples are harder to find in the video game industry – Artefacts Studios’ largely terrible but oddly enjoyable, Moto Racer 4 is one of those rare examples.
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