Neon Apex: Beyond The Limit – A Review

In fairness, my introduction to Neon Apex: Beyond The Limit almost caused me to become sick to my stomach. You start on a wireframe race track, in a wireframe city, that at blinding fast speeds felt like a strobing pulsating mess that turned my stomach upside down. The rest of the title draws heavily on 80s-influenced synthwave, with this stage in particular coming to feel more out of place as I continued having the vibe of a 70s game, you are excited to try on home console, but have only ever seen it in a black and white picture of a super computer. There is an uphill experience from this, and a far more interesting game in Neon Apex than I gave it credit for, but never something that salvages this first impression, at least not in the way I was hoping.

Neon Apex: Beyond The Limit is an anime-themed sci-fi racing game, though you would be excused if you didn’t realize that due to the character models that feel more at home on Newgrounds circa 2001. The player can drive Cars and bikes across a multitude of stages and modes that offer at least a depth of gameplay that the player has to explore, even if they might not be fully interested in doing so. Campaign is a more nuanced driving mode in which you pick a character and compete for money and exp, but have free rein to choose races to take. A single story mode is present in the title following the character named Chase in a quasi-80s-inspired narrative that features him racing for money, only to discover the machines are using him to facilitate AI learning. Additionally, there is a Championship mode, Time Trial, and versus mode that all do what you would expect them to do, though there is no online multiplayer, which dampens part of that experience.

Campaign, for my money, was the most enjoyable experience, given that you have the most options for how to enjoy it. Exp feeds into a leaderboard with the core goal to rise the ranks to number one. As you play, you get cards that act as unlockable options, such as cars, which you need to earn or buy to unlock each different vehicle. Like I said in my review of Spellcaster University, for some reason, every game needs to replace an average construct with cards these days; nobody knows why. Story mode limits you to playing as a singular character and vehicle, and plays over bland, unskippable dialogues in between, the first three almost entirely consisting of introductions to the other racers that didn’t manage to maintain my interest. You need to finish first in each race in Story to advance to the next chapter, while in campaign, you are awarded a payout based on placement, needing to put money into a race for the big payouts, making this mode a far more lenient affair.

This brings you to the actual racing, which feels a lot like F-Zero, though on stages I admittedly enjoyed looking at a lot more. Cars drive fast, but very often too fast. Starting a race, there is this weird element when you get to drive for a second, only for the game to transition to a cutscene of you driving from the side, then back to the race, which can easily throw off momentum. There is a similar effect when you nitro for the first time, which can be worse, given that you could be deep into a race when this occurs. You’re driving at 200 miles an hour at your slowest, so jumping out of the momentum could leave you mid-turn, or close to a turn that could just throw you against the walls when you return to recompense, which happened to me a lot. There is a damage function, so slamming into the walls will blow up your car and make you respawn, which gives the time that it takes plus the speed of every other car, which could prove to be insurmountable depending on how your race is already playing out.

While the story features lengthy runs along a long road, pretty much every other mode primarily uses lap-based maps, and weirdly… None of these felt at all different from each other. The game has minor, and very far between, deep turns, with most just committing to winding ones that your car is just too fast to manage. You can try slowing down to go into them, but this will probably set you behind the top three racers at least, with AI being near perfect, and you probably are not. There is also a drift, which is unfortunately also how you replenish nitro, and a pretty useless skill. Since most turns aren’t sharp or deep, it overcompensates for almost every turn, throwing you right into the inside wall, and on the turns you manage to perform it right, you get rewarded with a microscopic amount of boost charge. It also kills your momentum, feeling like you chose to step on the brakes and caused me to watch the racer I was outpacing pass me and never look back.

Races themselves could also prove to be frustrating, given the speeds. Lap races rely heavily on a gimmick that sees the player presented with a fork in the roadwith one path marked as the right path and one blatantly bad. For the most part, it easy easy to tell and adjust, that is, unless you just hit the boost and your barreling around a corner into it. Some are also right behind turns, and by the time you see them, you are locked into wherever you are on the track. There are also cars on the track you need to avoid, and boost does NOT make you immune, meaning when you choose to hit it, you could be slamming into cars left and right that you don’t even see till you’re making contact with them. This was preferable to getting hit from behind yourself, with many a race starting with the aggressive AI hitting me and sending me right into a wall, with them dragging, stuck to me. A similar thing turned me off to racing in The Precinct, but at least there was more game there, whereas this is the core experience and constant.

In a strange twist of events, the element I expected was going to drive me away, manages to become more enjoyable, the stages. While the tracks started to blend together, the backgrounds of synthwave-inspired orange and pink glows, with skylines stretching out, were actually enjoyable once they weren’t making me sick, which was only that first level. The music, as well, was a high point, making me nostalgic for the first time I played the PSP version of Ridge Racer, right up until the lack of usefulness in the drift made me actually nostalgic for how great it was in that PSP title. These elements helped to prolong my experience, but by this point, the game had begun to wear paper-thin.

Verdict

Neon Apex: Beyond The Limit manages to succeed when reminding what we lost when arcade racers dropped out of fashion. There are a lot of modes you can play, and some shocking depth to these modes once you jump into them. The level art style and music also helped to keep me invested after the game started to wane on me, and I had already sorta grown bored. The character art style didn’t keep me invested, that’s for sure. But in that lies the crux of the problem, the best aspects of the game don’t involve playing the game. The core racing loop doesn’t hold a candle to its contemporaries. In comparison, arcade racer Horizon Chase 2 is the same price, and while neither is perfect, I would recommend Chase every day of the week. Even bigger games like Burnout Paradise often go on sale on the Nintendo Switch, which is a common thing. Redout, the closest experience I can think of to this on modern consoles, is at base price cheaper. This isn’t even me attempting to sell these other games, but instead to illustrate just how much choice there is here, which unfortunately, Neon Apex can’t justify the choice of it over these.

If you are looking for an arcade racer, there is some enjoyment to be had here, but I wouldn’t expect it to last very long. The fast-paced racing can be very clunky, through mechanics that don’t always mesh together, with features like drifting that don’t even feel worth using. The aggressive AI seems hell bent on punishing you and doesn’t appear to suffer the same effect that you do when they come barreling into you. Factor in that the tracks rarely feel too unique to themselves, creating a blurring highway, and I was desperate to find the off-ramp.

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