There’s nothing quite like the feeling you get when you’re playing a racing game and you hit the seam just right coming out of a turn, scorch over some ridiculous boost mechanic, and just… fly. Upcoming indie Turbo Force, from newcomers Blitzkrieg Games, looks like a good opportunity to do just that… in a year or so.
The Steam page for Turbo Force bills it as an “ultra fast anti-gravity racing game with online competitions, deep gameplay mechanics, and a track editor.” Giving off serious F-Zero vibes, the gameplay video features some low-poly raceships flying around turns on a track hanging in midair over some pretty picturesque backgrounds.
While there’s not a lot to go on just yet, the stuff that’s there is pretty hype. The physics on the ships look smooth as butter, the tracks look interesting, and the theme playing over it is a banger. With some more development and an actual track editor, I could see this game being like a modern day mashup of Wipeout and Excitebike (I know I’m not the only one who spent infinite hours as a kid making up his own tracks).
With no new entries to the F-Zero or Wipeout franchises coming any time soon, it may be time for a new challenger in the antigrav race… space. After all, Captain Falcon has been doing more punching of faces than punching of gas lately—the last racing game he was in was F-Zero Climax on the Gameboy Advance in 2004.
In the meantime, you could check out a couple other entries in the genre. Redout 2 came out this June and features insane speeds, lots of racing physics challenges, and some cool dragons hanging out with you on steely neon tracks. BallisticNG is described by its creators as a “love letter to the original Wipeout trilogy,” and features super slick low poly ship design and an active mod community that periodically adds new tracks and ships.
