Team-based racing games usually disappoint because the team
dynamic rarely actually comes into play since you still always have to win so
it rarely matters how your teammates perform during a race. Trailblazers
changes all of that with team racing that actually feels like a team effort
thanks to the introduction of a Splatoon-like painting mechanic where
contributing by painting the track in your team’s color while in last place is
just as important as taking the checkered flag. With a bright and colorful
visual style, absolutely fantastic soundtrack, and fresh gameplay ideas,
Trailblazers seems like a winner, but how does it fare out on the track? Find
out by continuing to read our full Trailblazers PS4 review.Game Details
- Publisher: Rising Star Games
- Developer: Supergonk Games
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Racing
- Pros: GREAT soundtrack; nice visuals; cool concept; some genuine thrilling races
- Cons: Brutal A.I.; getting stuck to stuff; glitches; losing and not knowing why
- MSRP: $30
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Trailblazers takes place in a sci-fi world where you’re a
group of ragtag drivers trying to break into a futuristic racing league. There
are humans, aliens, and robots so it’s a bit like F-Zero or the anime movie
“Redline”, which is cool. You swap between different characters – each with
unique vehicles and different strengths and weaknesses - throughout the
surprisingly lengthy story mode, and every race is contextualized with
character motivations via text (and Simlish mumbling) cutscenes. While it is
commendable they actually bothered to put in a story, I have to admit I got
bored with it pretty quickly and started skipping over it pretty early on. I
just wanted to get to the racing and the cast of quirky characters got old
pretty quickly.
The racing, on the other hand, is fresh and fun and offers
up some unique thrills you won’t find in many other racing games. The biggest
and most important new idea Trailblazers brings to the table is the concept of
painting the track in your team’s color. With the press of a button you lay
down a stripe of paint that acts as a turbo boost for you and your teammates.
The other team(s) are also painting the track too (and covering up your paint),
of course, so after several laps the entire track is covered with criss-crossing
layers of different colors. The idea is to try to keep long uninterrupted
stretches of your team’s color intact so you can boost for as long as possible.
Your paint can also be an offensive weapon, too, as you can fire it forward in
a long stripe that will spin out opponents if it hits them.
The other important aspect of Trailblazers is that it is
largely a team sport and you can contribute just as much by going slow and
doing a good job painting as you can by running out front and winning. The story
mode gives you three different objectives for each race which consist of things
like reaching a point threshold for painting or racing well, beating specific
opponents, hitting a set number of gates (which put out long lines of paint
when you go through them), and more. Simply meeting one of the objectives in an
event allows you to progress through the story.
All of this adds up to a surprisingly dynamic game that
rewards players for contributing in many different ways. Painting is extremely
important, so making a clean path for your teammates to follow, or carefully
taking advantage of the path they leave for you, is the key to victory because the turbo boost provided by running on your team's paint is very, very fast compared to running at normal speed. Because
your opponents are also painting, however, every lap is wildly different from
the ones that preceded it that gives each race a satisfying tug-o-war feel as
you’re constantly jockeying for position. It also leads to some thrilling
finishes when you slingshot around an opponent right at the last second to
steal a position thanks to a carefully aimed shot or strategically placed line
of paint from a teammate. Trailblazers is a blast.
When it all works, Trailblazers is unique and thrilling and
awesome. It doesn’t always work, though. The A.I. is basically perfect so part
of the reason why you have to resign yourself to running in the rear and
contributing by being a great painter is that the CPU drivers (even your
teammates) are really hard to beat. The fact that your success or failure
depends on ever-changing lines of paint also means that sometimes you can go as
fast as you possibly can but still not be good enough, which is honestly pretty
frustrating to not be in full control of your own destiny in a racing game.
There are a couple of other major problems with the
gameplay. First, your vehicle almost feels magnetized to hit track walls and
opponent vehicles. If you brush a wall it is hard to get off, for example,
which saps all of your speed. Likewise, if you attack an enemy and spin them
out, more than likely you just plow straight into them and get stuck for a few
seconds, which obviously slows you down. This is really frustrating. I also had
a glitch on several different tracks where the game reset my position after I
went around a corner, as if the game thought I went off the track or something
and it would happen on the same corner every lap until I reset the game. It’s
hard to be competitive when the game keeps respawning you even though you
didn’t do anything wrong.
Like I said, when it all works, Trailblazers has the
potential to be great and unique fun. It just doesn’t work like it should all
the time and after the initial thrill of playing something so unique and fresh
wears off, the flaws start to show through and are hard to ignore. The game has
a story mode as well as local and online multiplayer. Playing against human
opponents leads to some interesting races, since humans are generally not as
perfect as the A.I. and can actually work effectively as a team, so it’s a
little better in multiplayer than solo.
It’s a bit of a shame the gameplay doesn’t hold up better
because the presentation in Trailblazers is awesome. The tracks are bright and
colorful and cool looking and the characters are all unique and have a distinct
cartoony style that is pretty appealing. The real star of the package is the
soundtrack, however. This collection of upbeat funky electro-pop tracks feels
like the second (third) coming of SEGA’s Jet Set Radio series. Yes, that is
high praise, but the music here is freaking awesome!
All in all, Trailblazers is extremely promising at the start
with a unique premise and fantastic presentation, but gameplay flaws flare up
pretty quickly that are hard to ignore. Any racing game where victory isn’t
necessarily tied to your own skill and performance is a hard sell anyway, but
when the A.I. is impossibly perfect and glitches and other issues constantly
slow you down it’s hard to have a good time even if you don’t “have” to win.
Trailblazers almost gets it right but comes up short where it counts out on the
track. Skip it for now.
