While the Switch is home to an abundance of arcade-style racing games, the more realistic games aren’t.
This is likely because the Switch’s hardware is said to struggle to keep up with the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports of this world, so developers often ignore Nintendo’s system when making their own serious racers. And let’s face it, when the Switch has received a port of a racing sim, the results have usually left a lot to be desired – take, for example, the clunky visuals that plagued years of the WRC games.
French indie developer Zero Games Studio attempts to find the middle ground with Hot Lap Racing, a game it calls a “simcade racer” – that is, a game that takes the serious elements of a simulation but offers the more forgiving, fast-paced action of an arcade racer. The results do indeed land somewhere in the middle, for better or for worse.
Being an indie studio, Zero Games doesn’t exactly have untold riches to throw at Ferrari and friends, so it’d be unrealistic to expect Hot Lap Racing to be bursting at the seams with a thousand mega-brand manufacturers. What it offers instead is a more eclectic mix of real and lookalike cars that should raise the eyebrows of petrolheads.
Given the developer’s French base, it’s perhaps no surprise that Renault, Citroën and Peugeot feature in the game’s roster of over 50 cars. However, there are also a number of interesting manufacturers in the game that don’t regularly feature in racing games, such as Alpine, Venturi, Noble, Minardi and Lola.
This is partly because the game’s main gimmick is the way it splits the car types (single-seater, GT, endurance and the like) into modern and historical categories. This allows Zero Games to showcase some of the more interesting models from the past, rather than simply whatever modern vehicles it can get its hands on.
This dedication to the non-mainstream side of racing extends to the drivers you’ll be competing against, some of whom are based on real racers from various disciplines (others appear to be fake). There are over 100 of them, and they serve as your opponents in the game’s main Career mode. Win a Championship they’re competing in and they’ll be added to your Driver Codex, complete with a small biography.
Aside from the typical Time Trial, Championship and Quick Race modes you’d expect from a typical racing game, Hot Lap Racing’s main offering is its career mode, which sees you take on a series of themed championships spanning different disciplines and time periods. Ticking these off – and completing them well enough to earn high rankings – will unlock parts for a fictional ‘Formula X-Treme’ car. It’s a solid way to do things, and adds some variety, even if the 17 tracks on offer (and their various course variations) do become a little too familiar by the end.
There’s also local multiplayer for one to four racers – either single races or full championships – as well as online racing. The local split-screen works well enough given the game’s limitations, which we’ll come to later, while we couldn’t find an online race during the pre-release period and we’d venture to say you’ll be hard-pressed to find one post-launch.
As ever, it’s out on the road itself that it’s all about, and it’s here that Hot Lap Racing will divide opinion. Performance was never going to be 1080p at 60 frames per second for a game like this on Switch, so the fact that the game aims for and largely achieves 30fps is admirable enough, especially as the resolution never seems to drop so far that things start to look blurry – it stays nice and sharp, even in handheld mode.
That said, it doesn’t always hit that 30fps target and the game has a habit of cutting out at busier times, including the start of practically every race when there are multiple cars on screen at once. This is unavoidable and is just something you have to deal with until the group spreads out a bit and there are fewer cars directly in front of you.
The handling differs quite a bit depending on the type of car you’ve chosen. Single-seater open-wheel (F1-style) cars have tight steering and are probably the most satisfying to drive, but other types have very loose steering and will have you powersliding all over the place, which isn’t as fun as it sounds. This is where the game’s ‘simcade’ philosophy bites it in the ass, as in its attempt to be a jack of all trades it never really succeeds in either direction.
Players looking for a more realistic simulation experience will be frustrated by the lack of tuning options, the slippery controls, and the frankly awful music that plays at all times (this can thankfully be turned off, but it does bring out the weak engine sounds as a result). Those craving more arcade-style racing, meanwhile, will be irked by HLR’s insistence on handing out penalties for veering off track, crashing into enemies and the like, meaning the game finds itself in a strange middle ground where you can be gung-ho, but only up to a point.
We’d be lying if we said he didn’t have a good time with Hot Lap Racing, despite its drawbacks. Its performance is certainly lacking (especially at the start of races) and it can never quite tell if it wants to be taken seriously, but we do enjoy its eclectic car selection, lengthy Career mode and focus on not just modern cars but those from the past too.
As long as you consider the issues before buying the game, there’s certainly enough here to justify the £30 asking price. And the fact that it’s at least trying to do something new with its car offering is something that should probably reward car enthusiasts with their purchase anyway.
Conclusion
Hot Lap Racing is too serious for an arcade racing game, and the controls are too loose to be considered a serious simulation. However, players looking for something in the middle will enjoy the game’s unique selection of cars and its dedication to racing history, despite its performance issues.