Aqua Moto Racing Utopia (Switch)
In the watercraft racing of Aqua Moto Racing Utopia, the other racers aren’t nearly as much of a concern as the water itself. You can learn the tracks, you can learn when to do the tricks, but if you don’t remain flexible for the way the waves move, you can find yourself suddenly in last place. As a result, not only is your success in this racing game down to how you handle that main hazard, but its own success as a video game is dependent on how much it allows you to accommodate the almost unpredictable incursion of the tides.
Aqua Moto Racing Utopia’s main focus is on its three separate tournament modes. After creating your own racer, you are able to tackle Jet Ski tournaments, the Runabout tournaments where you pilot a larger sit down watercraft, and the Free Style trick competition where the focus is not on racing but on earning points through special maneuvers. For the two racing modes, Aqua Moto Racing Utopia actually has a rather wide range of tracks to tackle that it splits up well to ensure consistent variety. While you might visually be racing in familiar places like the water near an oil rig, beside the cliffside houses of the Mediterranean coasts, in small contained watery stadiums, or through sunny island channels, the tracks are able to diversify by mixing up the placement of buoys. Your goal isn’t simply to clear laps as quickly as possible here, as you must race from buoy to buoy, passing them on the proper side for it to register properly. This can mean even when you’re returning to the same area, buoys and barriers can completely change the race. You might need to take large winding turns or rapidly weave through buoys all in a line, and what shortcuts are available can change based on how the buoys lead you through the natural barriers like rocks and housing.
The buoy system ends up the most important consideration when you’re out on the water, especially since the water itself could very well buck you away from your intended course if you don’t account for it well. There are courses with calm waters in Aqua Moto Racing Utopia, but oftentimes you will have to worry about the ripples underneath your watercraft, getting any amount of air limiting how much speed you can gain and how well you can take turns. In particularly choppy or stormy waters, the course itself may look pretty plain, but you can find yourself tossed up so high in the air that you’re constantly spinning to reorient yourself so you don’t go off-course. This watery rodeo can be an engaging challenge at times, trying to keep your jet ski or runabout on course while fighting a factor you can’t always predict leading to more involved driving than just trying to follow the course perfectly. It even adds some depth to otherwise obvious shortcut routes, especially ones involving ramps. You could likely take them all pretty easily if the water wasn’t tossing your vehicle around so often, so hitting a ramp is a risk you need to weigh every time you come up to one. Falling off your watercraft will slow you some but thankfully isn’t a death sentence, but there is some choppiness in how this racing style is executed that can start to impede its potential.
Aqua Moto Racing Utopia’s races will immediately disqualify you should you fail to hit the markers for three buoys. This does, at least, give you one interesting strategic consideration, as you can safely skip two buoys per race if you want to make your own shortcuts at parts. You do need to drive close enough for the buoy to register as missed though which hampers its potential but also prevents some of the more ridiculous shortcuts that could have been improvised. Game-controlled racers don’t seem to be particularly beholden to the disqualification rule, but they do at least attempt to get near every buoy and just aren’t too fussed if they go around the wrong side. Similarly, Aqua Moto Racing Utopia also will give an incredible boost to one specific racer per tournament to make them far more capable and potentially even a touch faster. Having a rival to make things tough isn’t a poor idea, but it doesn’t gel well with some of the unpredictable side of the game’s races. It’s not too uncommon for all riders to end up clustered and shoving each other about, and while you can use this to maybe ram another racer into a barrier to gain an advantage, sometimes you might instead find yourself going for a cluster of buoys only to be smashed into by an AI rider who shoves you through for an immediate disqualification. Most of the game’s tournaments are very short, made up of 3 to 5 tracks, and you get points equivalent to your placement in each race. If a disqualification was allowed to stand, you’d have no points compared to your rival who will almost always get first in your place and earn 12 points, a deficit you can’t possibly return from.
When even an errant wave can throw off a successful tournament run so severely, Aqua Moto Racing Utopia can start providing many frustrating moments where your best efforts to account for things feel like they aren’t paying off, but thankfully it does seem to understand that there should be some way to get around the occasional bad luck. Even if you finish a race, you can immediately retry it if you like to try and do better. You can pause any time during a race and hit restart as well, and even more importantly, if the game freezes like it did on me or you accidentally hit Abort Event when trying to hit the Restart option in the pause menu that is one spot off, you can reenter the tournament from the race you left off on. In this way, Aqua Moto Racing Utopia can sometimes feel like it’s almost about honing your performance in a race through repeated attempts, trying to get past the bad luck, figuring out the best paths, and watching the water to make sure it doesn’t work against you too much. On the other hand, the game has fairly long loading times, and when a race can go awry even in the opening seconds thanks to an overly aggressive AI racer, it can be disheartening to need to wait for those long loads.
In the Runabout and Jet Ski tournaments, you gradually work your way up to harder challenges that require better vehicles, the player earning money by placing well or gathering it out on the course that can then go into new vehicle purchases. Over in the Free Style events though, you’ll need to consider your vehicles differently, as speed is no longer a factor compared to the ability to perform stunts. Normally, stunts are used in races to build up energy for a turbo boost or earn a little extra cash. In Free Style, the goal is to earn as many points as possible purely through performing tricks. While you can do a few simple tricks while riding the waves like no-handers or lie-downs, what you really need to do is hit the ramps in the small areas these events take place in, getting enough air to do more advanced spins or impressive techniques. Most of these will tie to your control sticks, one for spinning, the other to indicate which specific action you want to take. Knowing when you have the air for the right stunts is important, but building up combos is even moreso, the player needing to string them together quickly and perform the riskier ones since combo multipliers only rise when you’re being daring. Oftentimes, these events involve finding the right sequence of ramps to hit to continually build a combo safely, there being some fun in learning the right route, and even in the challenges where you’re relying purely on the waves for getting height, it is satisfying to finally hit that first place. It will be built again on some unfortunate runs and slow restarts though, but when you do clear a track or event first try, it almost feels hollow because the resistance is where this racer finds its more engaging gameplay.
As an extra small touch, Aqua Moto Racing Utopia also includes a few minigames to play in multiplayer like air hockey by way of jet skis and a rubber duck collection game where they trail behind you and you can steal them by passing through. You do have normal racing for competitions with other human players naturally, although such definitive wins and losses feels starkly different from the training and refining possible through the game’s single player experience. Much like the time trials, the free exploration, and single event modes, this isn’t likely to be the big draw, but it does make Aqua Moto Racing Utopia a surprisingly large package, especially since there are already 50 unique regular race tracks thanks to the way buoy placement can change how a track feels. For someone interested in a water racing game on Switch, they’ll certainly find a lot to do in this particular title.
THE VERDICT: It’s not always smooth sailing in Aqua Moto Racing Utopia, but the rough waters are actually what give this game some of its spice. Each race is a mix of utilizing course knowledge and adjusting based on the way the waves ahead look, the player needing to gradually refine their reactive play to overcome unexpected complications. That style of play isn’t supported the best though, restarting events to learn them slow and while clearing a race feels like a satisfaction payoff to your efforts, losses can leave you wondering how you were even supposed to account for a sudden push past a few buoys. There is a lot on offer in Aqua Moto Racing Utopia, but the choppier races drag down the more exhilarating ones.
And so, I give Aqua Moto Racing Utopia for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Quick restarts would have done wonders for letting the player feel out the races of Aqua Moto Racing Utopia, but the realities of loading make it more of a drag than it should be. It would be easier to swallow the potential for an immediate debilitating disruption if the option for a retry was just as swift. There is definitely a nugget of an effective system here though, where sometimes you can get on a streak of compelling races where you’ve found the groove of adjusting your watercraft just right to handle the waves before some level starts to push too hard with its choppy waters or AI racers. If the game didn’t allow the restarts, it would be incredibly frustrating to see how often chance can completely throw off your efforts, but if chance wasn’t as big a factor, you’d get more races where it felt like you weren’t really opposed well. You need room for unexpected complications but also the means to account for them to keep this style of racing exciting and Aqua Moto Racing Utopia doesn’t perfectly strike that balance. Some intriguing ideas like deciding if missing buoys can be a benefit or a punishment to be avoided add some texture to races as do shortcuts that are a bit imperfect thanks to the movement of the tides. There is room for skill to lead to good results, needing to weave through swamps to avoid small grass clusters that work like speed bumps an example of dangers that aren’t just constantly trying to win the water rodeo.
Trying to keep the game’s general appeal alive while also accommodating misfortune feels like a tough balancing act. It can be thrilling trying to wrangle your jet ski as it keeps cresting off huge waves that almost throw it off course, but it’s not so nice when you’re shoved off course and miss important buoys for an immediate loss. Decent racing will occur more often than the irritating disruptions though, Aqua Moto Racing Utopia still offering much of what you’d hope to see from its particular brand of water sports with a good degree of content to keep that action fed. In a game that can often feel about refining your own abilities, it feels like the game could have used some more refining as well.