Screamer builds upon the impressive racing chops Milestone has developed with recent titles like Hot Wheels Unleashed, introducing a unique control scheme and focusing on an in-depth story. While some elements of the story drag or spin their wheels, there are enough strong character moments to propel you to the credits, even with some odd pacing. The side modes don’t have the depth I wanted, but what is there still features excellent racing mechanics.
.png?disable=upscale&width=1200&height=630&fit=crop "Brenda and John Romero: The industry is in a ‘horrible place’")
The star of the show is single-player tournament mode in Screamer, although it’s much more of a story mode with some racing in between. It follows a Screamer tournament for an absurd amount of money, where multiple teams are coming in to participate, some with clearer motivations than others. While the story mode is ultimately good, its structure does make it an odd experience.
While the story is about a tournament, there isn’t actually a tournament happening. It is happening in the plot, but your races are never tied too directly, and the rules are never laid out. It’s not the biggest hang-up I have with the mode, but it essentially becomes a series of visual novel cutscenes, broken up by races, with little to no stakes. You’re given clear objectives about how well you need to do in each race, but how that ties to the actual tournament, you’ll never know.
Instead, races serve as both gameplay and emotional beats. A race is often the result of a character needing to prove something or complete an emotional arc, but again, this makes for a story with limited stakes. The racing itself, however, is fun constantly.
The most compelling mechanic in Screamer’s racing is its dual-stick control scheme. On a controller, normal turning is done with the left stick, while drift turning is done with the right stick. Instead of using a button to drift into a corner, you can adjust how sharp your turn is and how much you want to drift into a corner. This level of precision creates a tight and responsive turning system, once you can get a handle on the controls.
This turning system works perfectly with Screamer, since it’s all about speed. Going fast builds boost faster, and powers other abilities depending on your racer, so being able to take corners with high precision not only feels incredible, but it’s necessary if you want to win in Screamer. Going fast builds up a boost meter, which in turn builds your strike meter when used. Strikes can be used to take out enemy racers, providing even more boost while forcing your opponent to take a short reset.
All of this comes together in a high-speed and explosive style of racing that sings once you bring all the pieces together. Combine that with each character having their own special ability, which aren’t massive game changes but instead small boosts to your playstyle. For example, Akane, my favorite character, builds Hype while driving at high speeds, rewarding a free speed boost once the meter is filled. The controls are unlike anything else I’ve experienced in a racing game, but once I got the feel for it became clear that Screamer is a fantastic racing experience.
The story of Screamer left me feeling pretty flat once the credits finally rolled. Abstracting the tournament from the story meant that all the stakes had to come from the character narratives, which more often than not fell flat. The Green Reapers, the first team you start with and more or less the main characters of this story, spend much of the plot spinning their wheels. They joined the tournament to take revenge on Gabriel of the Anaconda Corp for killing their old boss.
Between their revenge plotting, they struggle to determine who should lead and how. Unfortunately, on both fronts, very little progress is made emotionally, with the power struggles persisting until the characters move on because there are bigger fish to fry. Some other teams have better paced and more emotionally rewarding stories, like Kagawa-Kai and Strike Force Romanda, although part of that is just having less screentime to fill.
The eventual conclusion is messy and uninspired, attempting to weave every single plotline together while setting up the dominoes for a potential sequel. It’s rushed and, in one particular case, cruel in a way that doesn’t feel like it has a purpose beyond an exciting conclusion.
Outside of the single-player mode, there are multiplayer and arcade options to keep you entertained, although some modes feel shallow. The arcade racing mode allows you to pick and track in the game to race on, but there aren’t any options for stringing these together in a cohesive way. While the single-player mode is quite deep, taking about 10 hours to race through, not having an arcade ladder or some type of tournament you can set up for yourself feels like a waste of the couple of dozen tracks in the game.
The more compelling arcade modes are checkpoints and time trials, where you can race to place on a leaderboard. The checkpoint racing mode was a favorite for me, where you race between checkpoints with a constantly decreasing time limit, aiming to see how many checkpoints you can get through before time runs out. The constant pressure to go as fast as possible made it exciting to run the same track multiple times as I improved my turns and mastered it, making for a fun time.
The online multiplayer at least lets you randomly rotate through different tracks and race types, with the experience similar to how Mario Kart World handles matchmaking. You aren’t climbing up leaderboards, although there is another mode coming soon, but if you want to hop in a lobby and race against others, it’s easy to get in and out of a match. The online latency felt great online, and the intensity of the high-octane racing works perfectly against other people.
The Final Word
Screamer is an excellent, high-speed racing experience that takes big swings in controls and game design. The racing feels exciting at every moment, and the big single-player mode gives you plenty of tracks to burn rubber on. Much of the story lands flat or doesn’t have enough juice to cover the narrative’s runtime, but it provides enough of an excuse to keep getting back on track. The side modes are a little shallow, but that’s only frustrating because racing in Screamer is just that much fun.
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