Mini Review: Victory Heat Rally (Switch) - Great Looks, But Can't Quite Make The Podium

When Victory Heat Rally first appeared on Kickstarter back in 2020, the game appeared set to pay homage to Sega's wonderful Super Scaler range of arcade games from the 1980s. In the four years that have followed between that Kickstarter launch and this Switch release, something appears to have been lost along the way.

Rather than the Kickstarter trailer’s segmented rollercoaster-like tracks, which immediately conjured up memories of Seger's brilliant arcade racer Power Drift, instead the tracks in Victory Heat Rally look a lot more like the typical 3D environments expected from a modern racing game, albeit with cel shading designed to deliberately make them look more basic.

That's not to say this leaves the game entirely without charm, of course. You only need to glance at the screenshots on this page to see that Victory Heat Rally is still a wonderful-looking game, presenting a fantastic retro appearance with the player's car looking like one big chunky sprite hurtling down a pseudo-3D road (even though in reality it's just a big smoke and mirrors act to disguise what is really a standard polygonal racing game).

The main gameplay mechanic here is a drift move, where the longer you can hold it and the tighter you can implement it around turns, the more you build up a speed boost which is unleashed when the drift button is released. It's hardly revolutionary, but this at least makes it easy to get to grips with and within just a couple of races you'll have practically mastered it.

It's here where what should be a positive point actually reveals itself to be a negative, however: with just a single easily learned technique to master, it doesn't take long before Victory Heat Rally’s rather simplistic gameplay starts to feel repetitive. Its Championship mode, which clocks in at around 5-6 hours, does its best to alleviate this by giving you a mixture of lap-based and rally races as well as side missions with tasks such as knocking down cones, but the reality is that it does eventually feel like you're doing the same routine over and over again, as pretty as it looks. There's also the option to play split-screen multiplayer with up to four players, and here the game's simplistic visuals work a treat because it's still pretty easy to see what's going on when your screen is a quarter of the size.

The result is fun enough while it lasts, but is never wildly exciting enough to ensure you'll come back to it time and time again after the Championship mode is completed. Given the age of the Switch, there are now many racing games, including several with some sort of retro-inspired art style, all fighting for players' attention, and while Victory Heat Rally does a good job of positioning itself in the front half of the pack, it lacks that extra boost to push it into contention for a podium place.

As such, once you’ve played through what it has to offer, it doesn’t really have anything that will have you choosing it over any of its competitors any time you fancy a quick race. Nothing it does is particularly bad and you'll have a fun time with it, to be clear. It just feels like the dropping of the Super Scaler art style, while likely having no impact on the gameplay, was somewhat symbolic because the final game doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from the numerous other modern indie racers available.