OutRun 2019 (Genesis/Mega Drive)
It’s always interesting when the current year catches up with a work of futuristic fiction. Comparing how far we have come compared to the predictions of the past can often be comedic, but even when placing their game 26 years in the future, OutRun 2019 was perhaps not too absurd with its predictions. Sure, the car in this time attack racing game has a rocket booster in it and the roads somehow take you all across the globe at speeds land vehicles only achieve in real life when they are designed purely for breaking high velocity records, but the game that took the OutRun series to the future was certainly more reserved in its predictions than films set in 2019 like Blade Runner and The Running Man.
OutRun 2019 is a racing game where you’re trying to outpace the clock rather than pass other racers, your vehicle of choice being a sporty silver ride with a rocket booster in the back. Since the game limits your vehicle to only the single type, it’s more than capable of handling the turns you encounter and speed requirements to beat the timer, although that rocket booster definitely plays a huge part in reaching checkpoints in time for a clock refresh. By driving cleanly, whether that be by avoiding harsh turns, avoiding off-roading, or not bumping into obstacles and other cars on these global roads, the power meter on your dashboard overlay will gradually fill, automatically activating once its been charged completely. Cancelling the boost or reducing its charge is as easy as briefly pressing the brake button, and besides just controlling your car well on the road, managing your boost so it is deployed when it’s safe or to overcome rough terrain is a key factor in completing a course before time runs out.
Unfortunately, besides driving well and activating the boost at the right time for maximum payoff, there isn’t too much to playing OutRun 2019. Even the choice between a manual and automatic gear shift, despite manual claiming to be able to shed seconds from your time, doesn’t seem to impact the racing too much unless the manual shift is done poorly. There are only four stages for you to race through despite the box’s still unexplained boast of five (although perhaps it dishonestly refers to the Credits track your car races through with no input from the player as its fifth), and these tracks don’t throw too many new considerations into the race. All of them feature some baseline similarities; when you’re reaching a checkpoint area to get your timer refreshed, the roads take on a similar appearance to announce clearly the upcoming fork in the road. Each stage has multiple forks that will take you to different areas, these being how the game supposedly can take you from somewhere like the South Pole only to wrap up the race in Hong Kong, but even when you’re supposedly in a Submerged City or Acid Rainforest, the backdrop and color tone of obstacles prove to be the main changes rather than there being any area-specific changes to the gameplay. Choosing a route isn’t completely about the aesthetics though, as they all present the typical hazards in different degrees and amounts. Finding the safest and fastest path would be required if you’re angling for setting a best time, and the forks often lead to areas that present similar hazards but in different ways. Off-roading segments, tight turns lined with many roadside obstacles to bump into, and bridges with no rails that the player risks falling off are common ones, and later stages introduce the idea of two tiered roads where you can try and take the safe and speedy high road but require good driving to avoid dropping to the road below.
Like the presence of other cars on the road that are just moving obstacles, the hazards and shake-ups in road design are functional but not too exciting. They’ll factor into how you use your boost, and messing up badly by hitting into the wrong thing or falling off a bridge can make a track unwinnable even though the game will always set you back into the race after a bit no matter how badly you fail. However, there are some small ideas that are more annoying than legitimate obstacles. The off-road sections can often be skipped by hitting a jump ramp, one that, from a distance, looks a lot like the back of a certain enemy car type. Judging whether to go for one, especially since some jumps require active boot to clear the entire unpaved stretch, is more a test of visual acuity than reaction times. A bit more troubling though are the way the game renders hills. Despite the dashboard overlay, OutRun 2019 is viewed from a somewhat distant perspective to give you a good view of the car and the road ahead, and things like signs will usually telegraph upcoming turns, but when going up a hill, you can’t really see much of the road ahead, and the game will sometimes ask for tight turns immediately after with dangerous consequences for failure if you don’t take them. You won’t encounter these little issues too often, but in a game with so little content in general, they do stick out since they are such disruptions to a mostly competent track design ethos.
Despite having so little content, OutRun 2019 is fairly decent all around. The car that claims to be moving at almost 700 miles per hour when at full boost does have a great sense of speed and taking the turns during regular driving is an involving enough challenge, but it’s certainly one without any longevity. While OutRun 2019 embraced the future setting with its catchy electronic music and the weird architecture you see on the horizon, the game would have perhaps been better served embracing this conjectural future in its gameplay as well. Rough patches on roads and other drivers obstructing the road are fairly typical racing game hazards, and with so few tracks, they really were lacking in the wow factor that could elevate this beyond just a decent time attack racer. Embracing outlandish sci-fi concepts could have really injected more excitement into the fast-paced racing, but at least it never got so gimmicky that it hurt the solid driving design.
THE VERDICT: OutRun 2019 doesn’t use its sci-fi setting for much beyond visual flair and the boost mechanic, but its strong fundamentals ensure this time attack racer still can nail the baseline enjoyment you’d hope to find in a fast-paced driving game. Tight controls work well with the track designs even if the split route system doesn’t offer too many interesting options outside reshuffled hazards and turns, but there are very few road bumps that impact the enjoyment of this decent racer. It is heavily lacking in content, but competent design means that it plays about as well as you’d hope for the short time it lasts. Unfortunately, despite nominally driving all around the world in this future setting, the actual mechanics never go anywhere too interesting despite what’s present being a solid enough fit for the racing gameplay.
And so, I give OutRun 2019 for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…
An OKAY rating. A chance to take racing in a wild new direction is squandered on a game that plays it safe with its view of the future, aiming more for an appealing aesthetic than something that shakes up its racing design. It does toss in a few ideas like the two-tiered roads and rocket boost that deviate from regular racing titles, but besides the management of your boost you aren’t often tested beyond the basics of working your way around the tracks. The route splits definitely would have been more interesting if they deviated in design heavily, the backdrops not enough to incentivize searching out every alternate route. More vehicle options could have added a layer of complexity to trying to hone your skills based on car stats and how they agree with the different routes, but instead everything is designed to be handled by the single racer and the responsiveness of the controls also ensures it’s not too hard to get a handle for taking turns. You still need to be active and able to react on the fly as things like the other cars aim to stop you from getting to checkpoints in time, but the resistance isn’t strong enough to make it incredibly exciting and the gimmicks based on the future setting are minimal.
With no multiplayer and only a few tracks, OutRun 2019 doesn’t really provide much outside of its solid driving and the need to balance your boost meter. While its less than ambitious view of the future makes it a piece of media that pictured 2019 a little more reasonably than most, its unambitious gameplay also means it doesn’t have much too offer a player above typical video game racing. A somewhat rocky history of starting development as a Sega CD title called Cyber Road, transitioning into a prospective Genesis game known as Junker’s High, and finally ending up as part of the OutRun series might be partly to blame for its mostly straightforward racing and limited content. Whatever the reason for its design, the solid but unexciting design leaves little mystery why this futuristic racer has been largely relegated to history.