Screamer isn’t subtle. Screamer is neon-soaked, maximum volume arcade racing that requires both the finesse of Wipeout and the tactics and aggression of Mario Kart, where dicing for position demands that you think offensively and defensively at all times. Requiring the use of both sticks to fling your car around corners – plus actively shifting the semi-automatic transmission at the perfect time to build crucial boost energy – it’s also a fascinatingly busy racing game. Confidently different, Screamer makes a good case for itself in a genre rarely recognised for a great deal of innovation, despite being let down on occasion by a few dud tracks that slow the pace too much, some unbalanced missions in its central tournament mode, and no clear characters to really care about in its story.
Screamer’s twin-stick racing mechanics see the right stick used to dictate drift angle by swinging out the rear. The pendulum-like effect is a little overly pronounced in a few of the cars – which makes me disinclined to drive those ones – but it remains a pretty approachable system in the majority of vehicles. You have to engage with it; you get mild steering force with the left stick – enough to navigate shallow bends – but if you try to take a sharp corner without using the right stick you’ll simply understeer like a whale on a rollerskate.
Beyond its unconventional steering, Screamer draws inspiration from fighting games with a power-up system driven by two linked meters. In simple terms, one is for boost, and the other is for combat – and you fill the combat meter by using the boost meter. In action, however, there’s a lot of granularity to the system. Each character, for instance, has meters split into different amounts of sections, and each has distinct strengths and weaknesses when it comes to boosts, attacking, and defending. It’s an interesting juggle, even if some of the characters have drawbacks that make them a poor choice for some of the tracks. For instance, one character – who will explode if he clips a wall while in the attacking ‘Strike’ state – is typically a deeply annoying choice for any particularly twisty tracks.
The twisty tracks are by far the weakest, as they take the pace of the racing down too much as you stab the brakes to cater for the constant switchbacks. As quick as Screamer seems at top speed, it’s surprisingly soggy at low speeds.
In contrast, the more open tracks – full of straights and sweeping, constant radius corners – are a hoot. These are definitely Screamer at its full potential – particularly the incredible-looking, neon-lit, rain-soaked urban circuits.
