I ran a clean and perfect race and they suddenly blast past with mammoth new speed in the final few corners. I stopped on a track and they all stopped to a crawl. The AI has one of the most aggressive cases of rubber banding in recent memory. There is plenty of customisation for your cars but its all cosmetic only – including furry dice on the dashboard! It is part of the charm but along with the AI, it also becomes a little annoying too. The cars handle responsively but when you are power boosting round the final bends trying to overtake the extremely aggressive AI, you’ll feel like buckaroo trying to hold on.

So if you fill it up, you’ll get 5 separate boosts for example. You’ll get several elements on the gauge and you use each one separately and in full. This, along with the powerful slipstreaming effect of following behind other cars, will increase you boost gauge.

Doing so whilst steering will see the car drift out in a gloriously over the top drift. the car has grip for days and you’ll rarely need to fully brake for longer than a second or so. Taking cues from early kart games, this is all about drifting, slipstreaming and most importantly boosting. This also transfers over largely to how the cars handle too. I felt like I was right back in those arcades having a fantastic time. It is a sensory feast on the eyes and ears and that is Hotshot Racing’s biggest compliment. The chonky polygons, the bright colours, the eye bleeding speed of it all and the loud brash soundtrack served with ample stilton. Hotshot Racing evokes so much about that era of arcade racing perfectly.

Hotshot Racing looks and feels amazing – its a fantastic recreation of 90’s arcades. Anyone below the age of perhaps 22 probably wouldn’t understand. Going to the arcade was an eye opening wow event. I was born in 1984 and when arcades were in their boom, I’d just gotten myself an upgrade from a ZX Spectrum 3 to a Sega Master System. Throwing itself right back into the time when Sega Rally, Daytona 500 and the likes were storming the arcades in the early to mid 90s, Hotshot Racing is a love letter to the bygone era of arcade racing.

Download steam hotshot racing