Music Racer: Ultimate (2022)

My final thoughts on Music Racer: Ultimate is that the game caters to people who really love music and racing games and I’m just not one of those people. While I did have fun unlocking the many stages and cars while also rocking out to some of the music. I just think that it can get boring very quickly and the fact that I couldn’t play the game for maybe more than 30 minutes. The flashing and strobing effect of all the neon were just a little too much for me. Therefore I’m going to give Music Racer: Ultimate the Thumb Culture Bronze Award.

Music Racer Ultimate is a high-energy racing game with brightly-coloured visuals that uses your choice of music to create the courses. There are some neat vehicles to unlock, but the flashing, pulsing visuals made it hard to play for a long time.

Music Racer: Ultimate is going to be that game that is sporadically sought out to relax. The possibility of choosing any hit, regardless of rhythm, language or genre, is always good, but other than that, the game doesn't have much of an attraction. The gaudy colors are also a very strong point, as no one likes an explosion of palettes that causes more confusion than admiration.

Music Racer: Ultimate looks awesome and sounds great, but it flatters to deceive with mind-numbingly bland, unengaging gameplay mixed with some shockingly bad level design and poorly thought out structure as an overall package. When the solution to making your game more fun is to only listen and look, but not play, it becomes the video game form of “should have been an email”.

It’s sad to see such a promising idea for a game fall flat like this one. Music Racer: Ultimate could have been a somewhat worthy successor to Audiosurf if only the act of looking for a custom song to play in it wasn’t such a nightmare, all thanks to a terrible UI and search functionality. The seizure-inducing visuals and tracks that rarely match the beat of the song didn’t help either.