High speed, low latency running for our lives
Ladies and Gentlemen, DEATHSPRINT 66 be a racing game, but instead of car, we are man.
We are a man that is running — a running man, as one might say. This game wears its Stephen King influence on its sleeve, right down to the evil corporation named Bachman (King’s pen name for the Running Man book). Yeah, no, man, you’re a clone, you’re running and running fast. And dying. A lot. And it’s fun.
DEATHSPRINT 66‘s core concept is Mario Kart but on foot. Playing with a controller is exactly like any other racing game. Right trigger is go, left trigger is drift, A is jump, and X is boost. And Y is to use our weapon that we can collect. It has all of the Mario Kart trappings, but then it also has death traps like lasers and pits all over the courses. It has rails that we grind on, and it has boost pads that send us up into the sky, and it has ziplines that we can grab onto. (The ziplines and the grinding rails function exactly the same, because when we’re on them we stay there and can sway left and right.) And we can boost, at immense speed to rocket us ahead. They’re almost critical to winning a race, because we need them to catch up to our opponents or get through a sticky situation. To charge up the boost we can collect little lightning bolts, all while dodging lasers and hazards. There’s even some neat parkour that lets us wall grind to get across the chasms and pits.
From first glance it all even looks chaotic. There’s so much going on, at such a high speed, that if it can be dizzying. But when we get our hands on the controller it all falls into place really quickly. I was able to adapt to it instantly. The second we pick it up, we instinctively know how to play. If you’ve ever played a racing game, all of those things that you understand from racing games carry over into this. It’s just that we have to learn the physics differently because the weight’s different. We can’t just control the clone like it’s a car. We have to control it like it’s a person with two legs. With a car the wheels are stationary (for the most part, touching the ground) and they just pivot and turn and point in the direction and go. Here we have to take into account the fact that a person has to slow down. Humans have a different kind of physical momentum, and the application of it here is a cool differentiator. We have to predict when how a person would drift accurately, into and out of those corners.
There are online modes, but the PVE mode is a good place to start to learn the game. We have to get comfortable with getting obliterated over and over as we learn the courses. You don’t see a lot of human-focused foot racing games. And to put it into that dystopian theme, where we’re watching these people get horribly murdered, is kind of fascinating as a concept. Because every time we get killed, there’s person readying the next clone. They’re completely devoid of any feeling for these cloned people that we’re playing as, which is a cool idea.
For whatever reason, when we remove a car and replace it with a guy, it just makes it seem like it’s more insane. We’re still bumping and grinding into other racers, but now they’re people and we’re launching them into lasers and shredding them. But at the end it still is just a racing game, and apart from the dystopian aspect it feels a little thin. It has some performance issues and needs a little cooking, but the insanity of the whole thing may be enough to will us to dip our toe into it. Or get it cut off in a laser.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest for October 04, 2024. Images and video courtesy publisher.
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