A New Arcade Racer Puts The Best Part Of Mario Kart Front And Center: Betrayal
I’ll always have a soft spot for the games I’d play with my friends for hours at a time while we jostled each other on the couch and screamed at each other for any perceived betrayal. You know the ones: your Mario Karts and Mario Parties. Games where forging flimsy alliances against the one player who is perceived as the greatest threat, or being a filthy scumbag of a traitor who delights in chaos, are things that are not actually a part of the core gameplay loop in these games, but we as a society have decided that they should be. They are the video game Unos of the world. Racing game DeathSprint 66 is shaping up to be that kind of experience. I’ve played DeathSprint 66 twice now–once at Summer Game Fest and again recently at a preview event–and both times, the game tickled the lizard part of my brain that enjoys snatching away a victory from a friend at the last minute and offering up nothing more than a coy smile.
DeathSprint 66 sees you and seven other players (or bots!) race around tracks at breakneck speeds, utilizing augmented suits to sprint at high speeds, drift around corners, grind along rails, wall-run, and make incredible acrobatic leaps. All the while, the track and the other players pose as constant dangers–shifting laser grids and massive buzzsaws dot each track and items like heat-seeking drones and landmines can be picked up and used by you and your competitors. It’s a dangerous competition, but thankfully you’re only racing as your character’s clone–and you bring a handful of backups with you to each race, so every blood splatter or eviscerated limb is only a few seconds of delay in your day.
Don’t worry about losing your legs–your character has several backup clones who can jump into the race.
Nearly every aspect of DeathSprint 66 is geared around the mayhem and the process of taking advantage of others to improve your own chances of success (running directly behind a competitor and in the draft they create, for example, grants you a quick burst of speed to pass them by). DeathSprint 66 is ripe for friendly betrayal, and I felt nostalgic for Sonic Riders while playing it (the first one, obviously; not its weird sequels). It’s also very approachable–though the tougher tracks are trickier to get around, DeathSprint 66 is a mechanically simple game, and a few runs around each track will give you a pretty good idea of where you can go. Once you grasp that understanding, it’s just a question of practice. If you’ve played an arcade racer like Mario Kart or Sonic Riders, you already have an understanding of the type of game DeathSprint 66 is.