Summary
NASCAR Arcade Rush isn’t necessarily the game fans of the genre asked for and its lack of content doesn’t show promising longevity.
Developer – Team6 Game Studios
Publisher – GameMill Entertainment
Platforms – PC, Xbox Series XlS (Reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch
Review copy given by Publisher
GameMill Entertainment and Team6 Game Studios have come out with their vision of an arcade-style NASCAR video game with NASCAR Arcade Rush. Let’s jump into the driver’s seat and give our impressions of the latest racing game from GameMill that provides heart-pumping and high-speed competition.
NASCAR games traditionally consist of boring oval tracks that have no flavor to them providing a subpar experience, but with NASCAR Arcade Rush it twists those iconic tracks into a fun experience. With this being an arcade game you can expect it to have unrealistic elements like constant boosts available through the entire track with crazy jumps, interesting aesthetics, and crazy turns. During a race, you are competing against eleven other AI racers that try to provide a challenge to you.
During your racing experience in this game, there are a bunch of options to boost around the track that play a big part in how you will place in a race. During my continuous use of boosts, I experienced frame rate drops on some of the tracks while playing on my Xbox Series X, which was unexpected. Additionally, while making sharp turns, I noticed that the steering felt looser than in typical racing games.
NASCAR Arcade Rush does offer a decent variety of customization allowing you to customize your racer and the car, but you are limited to what you can do. All of the customizations for your car are cosmetic based so you can’t actually make it better by tuning it and since this is an arcade game we wouldn’t expect anything in-depth. In order to unlock different types of cars in this game is by progressing through your “XP Level” which goes up to Level 100. You gain XP by completing races and depending on how you place you’ll receive a certain amount of it.
The single-player experience comes in the form of a ‘Cup Series’ that only includes nine total series that can be completed in less than 5 hours. You can either play this with the Rookie or Elite difficulty, but honestly either one doesn’t provide much of a challenge when you play solo. There’s also Quickplay where you can choose which track to play on or you can do Time Trials and try to earn gold on each race track. I found this experience to get boring over time as you’ll be racing on some of the same maps throughout the Cup Series.
NASCAR Arcade Rush does offer online play, but I had a very hard time trying to find matches in fact I couldn’t find a single one. Keep in mind if you are thinking about purchasing this game you’re bound to have a strictly solo or couch co-op experience.
This game does a great job of providing an arcade experience, but it does lack a few things. There isn’t enough variety in terms of race tracks as it gets boring very quickly. Visually this game is not appealing from the cars to the characters and more importantly the atmosphere of each race track. During a race, it can be challenging to anticipate how a jump will be landed. One personal annoyance is that the game forces you to watch the intro every time you start it, without an option to skip.
I found the audio in the game to be repetitive with the sounds of boosts and typical race car sounds constantly looping every time.
I wouldn’t recommend purchasing NASCAR Arcade Rush for its large price of $49.99 USD on all platforms. If you were interested in buying this game I would wait a little longer for it to go on sale as the game’s content doesn’t fulfill a purchase at its launch price.
