For someone who isn’t super into cars, I found the early access release of Tokyo Xtreme Racer surprisingly fun (even if the terminology for upgrades was fairly daunting). Idly driving around the Shuto Expressway and flashing your high beams at someone to start a race can be quite entertaining. Especially since everyone seems willing to part with some money if you beat them, but it doesn’t cost you a dime to lose. Steadily hunting down and working your way through the local racing gangs also makes for some exhilarating pocket moments as you hurtle across the asphalt. However, I’m just not sure how long my interest in all this will keep up.
You play as an aspiring racer looking to make a name for themselves in the racing world. To do this, you cruise around the Expressway looking for other racers to square off against. Gang members will have their known racing areas marked on the map, so all you have to do is head to those on-ramps and then drive around until you find them. As I said, though, you can challenge just about anyone to a race if you flash your lights at them. If your chosen foes doesn’t seem to be around, you can always challenge some mom driving a minivan or a guy driving a work truck instead.
So, how does a race get decided in the middle of the road in Tokyo Xtreme Racer? You and your opponent each get a health bar of sorts once the race starts, and this drains as one of you gets far ahead of the other. If you can get a good lead on your opponent, their bar will start to drain. It does so more dramatically if you get a greater lead. If you bash into them or if they crash into a barrier, the drain increases as well. So, the object is to get ahead of the opponent and stay ahead for a little while until the game declares you the winner.
This can be a complex process as you’re far from the only person on the street. Not only this, but as you’re on a stretch of “real” road, there are all kinds of turns, barriers, and other things that can make the track complex to navigate. Even if your opponent technically has a faster car, if you’re better at maneuvering in dense traffic, you might be able to get them stuck behind another car or force them into a barrier. Likewise, you may get stomped if your foe is better at handling corners and you start a race near a particularly curvy section of road. Knowing the long tracks and being able to quickly assess good routes through traffic are a big piece of your success.
Still, you can always tweak your car to make up for your weaknesses and just annihilate the competition with your speed and handling in Tokyo Xtreme Racer. As you win races, you get CP that is points you can spend on getting new cars or getting upgrades on your existing ride. Naturally, getting a whole new car is far more expensive, so for a while you’ll be getting small upgrades to your brakes, clutch, power limit, exhaust, and more to slowly build up your own racing beast.
Now, as I know nothing about cars, I couldn’t tell you what many features will actually do to improve the vehicle, but making numbers go up made a noticeable difference in my ability to win, so I stopped thinking about it very hard. That said, there are some more complex upgrades that unlocked as I improved elements of my car that I had no idea which was better, which was a bit mystifying. Setting the gear ratio on my transmission allows you to alter when you switch gears, as far as I can tell, but what benefit that would convey was far beyond what I learned while playing the game. I was still beating opponents, though, so it seems like the sort of stuff you could learn with time or interest to really soak every bit of speed out of your build. That said, it does make the game feel far more daunting than it might actually be if you’re not interested in this stuff.
There is a secondary currency of sorts in Tokyo Xtreme Racer: BP. You use this currency to unlock Perks in a skill tree. These can give you abilities in a race to give you some more cash while driving around idly, let you do more damage when you are ahead of your opponent, or take less damage when they get ahead of you. More annoyingly, you also can’t upgrade a lot of the aspects of your vehicle beyond a single level without unlocking higher level upgrades on the Perk tree. This makes higher level upgrades a bit more expensive as they require you to unlock two things (and using you BP on part unlocks means you can’t upgrade other Perks). I would have preferred to see more division between car upgrades and passive driver upgrades, as it feels like I’m missing out on cool abilities in order to unlock the stuff that should just come from using CP. Although this also feels more like just a personal quibble.
Now, since there is so much stuff to earn money to buy, that means you’re going to need to win a lot of races (as you can earn both CP and BP from races). Thankfully, there are a bunch of different gangs running the streets, so there’s no shortage of sources of upgrade currency. That said, none of the basic races or repeat battles with the same gangs give you very much, so progress can feel fairly slow. I spent a good amount of time racing against nobodies and low-level gang members just to flesh out the basic upgrades on my first car. I still enjoyed my time doing it, but progress can be pretty slow as you race around.
It didn’t help that the realism of Shuto Expressway is fairly boring in Tokyo Xtreme Racer. What I saw of the game was largely just gray chunks of expressway at night with some lit up buildings nearby. The tracks themselves add a bit of personality with their medians, straightaways, and curving sections, but they’re not terribly exciting, visually, leading me to feel like I was just spending hours upon hours on the same chunk of road. While the races were fun, playing the same opponents on the same roads to slowly build currency started to wear thin after a while. It was a game I could play in little bursts when I felt like driving around, but it felt like too much of a slog if I spent a long time playing in one session.
There is some fun story stuff that tries to bring some excitement and background to the racing. The game features a log of all of the people you can potentially race, revealing some backstory to them that seems well thought out. It adds a bit of fun to learn about the other racers, although reading it from a menu is less entertaining than if it had been worked into the gameplay somehow (although that might have made racing less interesting as it would have slowed down the actual racing). There are some brief plot snippets as you meet the heads of rival gangs, but the silhouette art style for these characters means a lot of the game’s story plays out in your imagination. Same thing happens with the written backgrounds. It feels like you have to do a fair amount of mental legwork and reading if you’d like to see some story with your racing. It’s nice that this gives players a choice, but the story and characters aren’t compelling enough to really draw me in.
If you’re interested in cars and more realistic racing, Tokyo Xtreme Racer should keep your interest. The game already has a slew of cars from real world companies and its upgrade system appears to draw from real knowledge of how cars work. The amount of time you need to sink into buying the best cars or upgrading your car into something that can beat the best is considerable, though, and with all of the track feeling a bit the same, even the excitement of weaving between cars on the highway starts to wear thin. As I said, it’s pretty fun in small doses, but the longer you spend with it, the more it feels like a slow crawl to getting your car to where it needs to be so that you can do a fairly similar race with a faster driver. If you just need a solid racer to pick at or you like the ability to really toy around with car designs, this title might have you covered.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer is available on PC in Early Access.
Published: Jan 28, 2025 10:00 am