MLGG: Pop Culture News, Reviews & Interviews

Despite a positive collection of reviews on Steam, Electro Ride: The Neon Racing doesn’t seem to have received great care and attention in being ported to Switch. Similarly, the smooth, fast footage you’ll see for the PC version seems very different to the experience you’ll have on Nintendo’s hybrid console.

I’m getting way ahead of myself, however. Electro Ride: The Neon Racing is set in an alternate Eastern Bloc, where the Iron Curtain doesn’t fall – and instead, a glowing technological utopia rises with the march of progress and prosperity. Amidst this neon wonderland, racers in classic cars speed through the endless night along pulsing, colourful highways – and you’re aiming to be the best of them.

The setup and visual aesthetic are fantastic, giving the game a really unique look and feel. The colour of your car matters – and can be changed by collecting stars of the appropriate hue – as you’ll only get speed boosts from track features that match your car’s colour. The synthwave soundtrack is really cool too, along with some nicely done cut scenes.

Yet the game suffers from the cars being far too twitchy to control; it’s incredibly frustrating to try and keep your car on the track and it all feels very janky, even down to placing your car back into the race. It’s such a shame that the gameplay isn’t quite there, because – despite its obvious low budget and less-than-smooth motion in practice – it’s clear the developers have tried to do something different from the norm.

If you can get past the stiff challenge of controlling your vehicle, which quite often doesn’t behave how you think it should, there’s quite a bit of content on offer and even a splitscreen mode. It’s just a shame that it’s not actually fun to play and is lacking in any sort of visual flair beyond the wonderfully colourful style. It feels like a missed opportunity, but given that the physics and ‘feel’ of the cars have been given an overhaul in recent weeks on the PC version, we can only hope that the same happens for the Switch port. If it does, I’ll be sure to update my review accordingly. In its current state, however, it’s not a game I’d recommend picking up.

I was provided with a code for Electro Ride by the publisher for review purposes.

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