80’s Overdrive (Switch)

The 1980s is a decade defined by technology’s impact on pop culture. At the cinema people were seeing huge blockbusters with lasers, time machines, and killer robots, on the radio people could listen to the burgeoning techno genre as electronic music started to catch hold, and while video games weren’t invented in the 1980s, titles like Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. helped the video game medium really pick up steam and enter the public consciousness. Unsurprisingly, during this growth period for the medium, the racing genre was seeing some of its first landmark titles take shape, with games like Pole Position and OutRun cementing themselves as part of this already beloved decade’s cultural footprint. 80’s Overdrive aims to take the player back to this decade by mimicking the setup of these old arcade racers while drenching them in the aesthetics of the time period, and that commitment to style is certainly its biggest eye-catcher.

The beautiful pixel art immediately leaves a strong impression, the environments you race through managing to have a varied color palette despite trying to tap into nostalgic neon tones with many of them. The cityscape’s purple sky, green ground, and grey buildings all mix together for the background that best embodies the stylistic proclivities of the time period it is paying homage to, but 80’s Overdrive doesn’t just lean on retro stylization with its locations. A lovely beachside road is bright and vibrant with many people gathered for summer fun on the water you race past, an autumnal forest evokes the feeling of driving through the long stretches of New England interstate where only nature can be seen beside that stretch of tarmac before you, and you even get to visit some ruins at sunset that add an unexpected but appreciated ancient history aesthetic to the mix. Even if you’re racing through a desert populated by the rampant industry in the area though, the road itself rarely incorporates the backdrops into its design. Your driving is meant to stick very closely to the road with no options for shortcuts or corner cutting, so beyond sticking some different dangers in the small section of offroad ground you can drive in, these areas are simply meant to make the racing more interesting visually and they do look nice enough that they don’t wear out their welcome even as the game starts to repeat them.

The stylistic influence of the 1980s permeates the music as well, the game’s eighteen tracks deliberately designed to sound like retro techno tunes. A fair bit of them can be surprisingly ominous, and a few even remind me of Tron with similarly moody and simplistic electronic sounds. Besides one track that kicks off with a lightsaber sound and a tune that sounds like it’s somewhere between Madonna’s Material Girl and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun though, many of them do fade into the background a bit as you play despite being decent enough. The game does break its 80s aesthetic a bit as well with its odd use of emojis, other drivers on the road sometimes expressing themselves through little speech bubbles with the expressive faces thrown in for some odd reason. These do sometimes block your view and make it a little harder to see what’s ahead and react, but it seems like these were meant to make the other racers or civilian drivers feel more lively only for it to break away from the art direction while still feeling somewhat pointless. An angry driver won’t behave much different and seeing them cry isn’t really giving you useful info since they’re still moving along at the same pace despite this supposed emotion they’re experiencing. It’s easy enough to ignore for the most part, but it does feel like the one aesthetic area the game really drops the ball in creating its 80s coat of paint.

Once we start to move away from the 80s tributes and start looking at the driving though, things start to get a bit less exciting. Driving is incredibly straightforward in 80’s Overdrive, there being no real advanced techniques to pull from as your major concern will mostly be taking turns safely and weaving through the traffic that is still driving on the road. Even with the weakest vehicle you can buy you’ll still have a fair bit of control over your car of choice, the difference in grip between cars mostly determining how easy it is to zip across lanes and take a turn without needing to lean on the brake or release the accelerator for as long. So long as you don’t crash headlong into something you’ll easily be able to reach first place and hold it without much issue unfortunately, the other racers only really able to pull ahead if you get off to a sloppy start that you can’t recover from. Oddly enough though, while collisions are your main concern, how these unfold can be a bit inconsistent. Usually tapping something from the side is safe enough, but if you come up on a car from behind, sometimes you can end up briefly fusing with the vehicle before separating safely. Even stranger are the times your car just plows right through the middle of another vehicle with neither looking much worse for the wear afterwards, so the outcome of the game’s biggest danger isn’t always set in stone because of these impact oddities.

While you’re driving along the roads of 80’s Overdrive, some tracks may throw in the danger of police officers. Once you pull ahead of one, they’ll briefly be on your tail, flashing lights indicating where they’ll be speeding in from. Their tactic, when they can’t rear end you, seems to be driving ahead and coming to a stop in the hopes you’ll ram into them, and in all but the tightest stretches of road this is fairly easy to work around once you understand how the officers behave. They’ll do this tactic three times before giving up and are the kind of obstacle that loses its luster once you understand it, and part of it just has to do with the structure of the lanes. Most tracks will shift their amount of lanes the further along the course you are, but only rarely does it tighten things down to less than four, so unless there’s a lot of traffic around at the time, the police officers can’t dominate the road much. While having varying sizes for the road does lead to different driving options to get around all of the civilian traffic, later into the game it stops doing large open lanes and starts featuring the same basic idea of splitting the lanes into two sets with a dirt divider between them. You can offroad into this dirt to switch into the other set of lanes, and it is likely this is trying to make things feel a little more claustrophobic, but swapping to the other lane set is often fairly safe to do since the dirt doesn’t slow you down much. Rather than spicing up the track design, this repeated use of splitting the road down the center becomes a dull part of the game you must accept. The only other real twists to the road design are when there are hills and these don’t really impact your driving since they’re so small and inconsequential, so the actual tracks can grow fairly bland despite the stylish background art.

Definitely one reason the racing grows stale so easily is the structure of it. There is no multiplayer mode, so you’re going to need to either play the Career or Time Attack mode. Career is a set of different races where you try to build up your reputation by winning on all the different tracks, and one way the game could have made this more interesting is through its upgrade system. You earn money based on your performance in a race and also need to devote some of it to entrance fees, refueling, and fixing damage to your car, but you are also able to buy upgrades for your vehicle or even purchase new cars. Earning the cash to work your way up to a more capable car is appealing at first, but as you start to rake in the winnings easily in those early races, you’ll learn that the AI really is a pushover most of the time. If you don’t get in a harsh crash you’ll easily be able to maintain a lead, and even if you do mess up, retrying from the pause menu is free. The cash influx from these easy victories means that upgrading your vehicles often doesn’t feel necessary as you can buy your way up to some really good vehicles before you’re even halfway through the campaign, and even as I stuck with weaker builds as I held out on buying upgrades to purchase the better cars, the other racers rarely managed to be competitive enough to be much of a concern. Complacency can lead to them passing you up so it is not a bunch of guaranteed wins, but your biggest enemy to losing first place in a race is often your own mistakes rather than racing against competent opponents. Even if you do mess up though, you can buy Nitro for your vehicle and use it up to two times per race, this giving you an effective means to make up for the ground you lost during such slip-ups.

Missions are an effective way of giving more life to the Career mode though. Sometimes before a race a sketchy figure will approach you with an offer, this stranger willing to pay you handsomely if you perform some secondary objective while out on the track. Some of these are simple enough like grabbing floating items that may sometimes lead you to drive into a dangerous situation to grab them, but others can vary wildly in how they impact the race. The ones where the game asks you to damage another racer can often be completed with one or two hard bumps, and when the game asks you to pass up a specific driver, it’s often just part of earning that first place victory anyway so it doesn’t feel special. However, missions do sometimes ask you to earn a certain standing in the race like third place, and these can be a bit more interesting as you need to ensure you’re driving poorly enough to get passed by leading racers while making sure it’s not so bad that the lower ranking drivers pass you by as well. You can retry a race even after finishing it so you can still earn a first place victory for your rankings even after doing these placement missions, and unfortunately none of the other missions really ask you to alter your racing style in such a drastic way as to leave a big mark on how you play.

Career mode mostly is just too easy for its own good, long stretches of road often involving you driving unopposed. Time Attack unfortunately cranks this up even more as it is no longer a race but instead an OutRun inspired road trip. This long drive has you pick which exit to take when you reach a junction, the goal being to get as far along your specific branching path before you run out of time. Reaching a new area will give you a big boost of time even though the further along the road you get the longer you go before you can hit these checkpoints, but you can also earn time with some fancy driving. If you are able to just barely avoid skimming another vehicle’s side as you drive, you’ll get a few seconds added to your timer as a bonus. If you want to make it far you’ll need to not only have an extremely good car you earned in the Career mode but you’ll also need to keep doing these near misses to build up your time reserves. Despite the attempt to keep you engaged with this requirement though, the driving still feels slow even when you’re moving at high speeds because so much of the road ahead is easily navigated and empty beyond the next car or two you’ll need to nearly brush up against. After a few minutes of playing Time Attack it just starts to drag as nothing is done to shake up a formula with very little lasting power. It ends up hard to find the motivation to push deeper into this mode, especially since the new areas are only really changing the background to make them feel different.

The last major mode of interest is the track editor mode, but the name is unfortunately a bit deceptive. You don’t really get to design a track so much as feed a few details into the game’s list of preset options to randomly generate a track. Rather than getting to place turns, you don’t even see your map as you enter how many turns you want it to have total, and if you want to include something like hills, you must set them all to one steepness level rather than making them feel varied. There is no online so you can’t even share these outside of a password system, but the real issue is that it hardly feels like you’re building the track because you’re just telling a machine to output your decisions in a randomly generated race course. Having more control wouldn’t lead to any exciting designs either due to the simple designs of the courses featured in the other modes, but like every other mode in 80’s Overdrive, it feels like this mode was created because it was enjoyable in other games but none of the important elements of those games are incorporated here to support such a gameplay option.

THE VERDICT: The nostalgic aesthetic of 80’s Overdrive can easily dazzle a first time player as the beautiful backgrounds, color choices, and techno music feel like a good match for the era it is paying homage to. Once you start racing though, you’ll find this game might be more shallow than the 80s racers that inspired it. The upgrade system in Career mode allows you to grow too powerful when you can often easily outrace the AI with weaker cars, the Time Attack mode just feels like an endless and bland road trip, and the track designer is just feeding data into a random level generator that can’t make anything interesting due to how basic the road designs are throughout. The missions have some potential to make you play in a different manner and success isn’t always guaranteed due to the effect one bad crash can have on your ability to win a race, but most of 80’s Overdrive lacks a sense of excitement or speed because of how much it leans on basic design choices.

And so, I give 80’s Overdrive for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. While the driving in 80’s Overdrive is responsive and the AI plays fair with no artificial cheating on their part to keep pace with you, this doesn’t pair well with a racing system that doesn’t do much to challenge a player in the lead. There’s no need to drift or room to be creative with how you drive, you just stick to the road and weave through the traffic to avoid crashing. Even when a mode like Time Attack concocts the idea of needing to drive close to danger to earn time bonuses, that mode becomes so much about that aspect that it grows dull rather quickly too. Games like OutRun kept timers very tight to demand the best driving, and others might include legitimate track design features like unusual hazards or special shortcuts so that you need to be prepared to act appropriately to gain an edge or avoid disaster. The other drivers in 80’s Overdrive, despite sometimes just erratically moving between lanes, are easy enough to get around, and since your increased speed often comes with increased grip as you move up the small vehicle ladder, you don’t have to worry about accidental offroading much either.

80’s Overdrive is quite clearly devoted to its visual and sound design first and foremost, the racing lacking any features that make it stand out or assure it some degree of longevity. Many games can be summed up in a quick sentence so you know what sets it apart from other members of its genre, but 80’s Overdrive is just a racer that is aping the style of the 1980s. The funny thing is, the 1980s had plenty of racers, some that balanced their difficulty better or had gimmicks beyond visual presentation to keep you hooked. While it may be able to throw together a visually appealing tribute to the era when video games really started to find their footing, 80’s Overdrive copies the simplistic mechanics of the time period but has no ideas of its own. It may be copying the innovators of the past, but 80’s Overdrive has no interest in pushing the envelope with its run of the mill racing design.