I really want to recommend this game, sing its praises from the rooftops, but I just can't. The racing gameplay is extremely good, with an amazing sense of speed and a high skill ceiling, full of all of those F-Zero stylings that make your heart drop and your body tense up. Even the unexpected combat zones are pretty fun! The music is awesome, the game runs super well (I've got it going at 240 FPS!), the art design is great, and I like the diversity of the characters and vehicles.

Unfortunately, it its current state, there is just a really big problem with polish. The core gameplay is rock solid, but it exists within a bear trap that will bite you on the way in and won't let go. Many players, including myself, have experienced the game going completely black in the options menu and needing to either quit the game or move it to another monitor to bring it back. I had a softlock in a combat zone and there is no option to restart from a checkpoint or anything, so I had to completely quit the game and then launch it again. For whatever reason, there is a boss battle that, upon beating it, completely soft locks the game so I just can't progress through the story whatsoever (and I need to relaunch to even try again and hope that it works... it doesn't). When the player can't even beat your game, you need to fix some things.

On top of some really jarring, obvious bugs, there are some smaller ones that could be overlooked here and there. Collision can be a little spotty, I was going so fast I flew threw a wall once and got DQ'd but I guess you should be hitting into walls anyway. There is also just a lot more downtime in between actual gameplay moments (and even story moments) than I would like. If I want to do some races, I shouldn't have to walk around a small level with nothing else in it for me to get to them. Either let me select the race from the menu, or put something meaningful in that area I have to walk around in. It's weird because there are people to talk to at the beginning of the story mode, and they will set up different races with you that have interesting tidbits to them, but that only happens twice in the entire game and I would have loved to see more stuff like that.

Again, there are some really great things on display here. The tracks are, for the most part, really awesome and fun to race on. I like all the characters a lot, with a soft spot for Wolfman and Digi. The story itself feels a little undercooked and there were a couple moments that left me aghast with how unhinged they were, but it is still intriguing at the very least. I can tell there was a lot of effort put into the lore of XF's universe but unfortunately it doesn't really seem like much of that comes out in the story, which is unfortunate.

But yeah... if I can't even beat the story because the game is literally preventing me from doing so, I can't recommend the game. Not until it gets fixed up. Who knows if that will ever happen, either, because the developer has said he's no longer interested in working on it and already has a new project he's dedicated to. It almost feels like he used the Early Access stage for making sure all of the content was in the game, but not for making sure all of that content was scrubbed of some of these major, glaring issues. I really, really hope he comes back to fix this and I'll definitely update my review if he does.

#beardgamereview