Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code

Title: Rider’s Spirits
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 06/07/2024

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Story

In this obscure racing game from Masaya… You take control of one of eight racers as they ride out on their bikes! Of course there isn’t a plot here, just racing!

Presentation

The usual Ratalaika wrapper returns, with the usual screen size and filter options, all working as they should. Not much new to note here. There are also Manual/Box Art/Cart Label scans, which for a game like this, was way more bonus content than I was expecting!

Visually, Rider’s Spirits really makes it obvious how much it was inspired by Super Mario Kart. You have a mode seven perspective, with lots of familiar scaling effects and a split-screen view at all time, and a lot of the track backgrounds feel really identical to the sort of scenery you’d see in SMK. The music is equally playful, with similar instruments that leads to a decent, if unremarkable OST. The in-game text got fully translated, but otherwise there wasn’t much to begin with.

Gameplay

Rider’s Spirits is a very simple racer, playing a lot like your typical kart racer from the time. You have an accelerate, brake, sharp turn, and multiple boosts available per race, along with various items you can find near the finish line or from a rare item box, such as seeking missiles or the ability to blind your opponent. You have several GP cups to clear, each with five tracks, and whoever has the most total points by the end of it all is the victor. Very typical stuff here, plus a time trial mode for setting your best times, along with an endurance mode where you relay to another character of your racer’s class to avoid running out of fuel.

Really there isn’t much here besides just some courses and the racing mechanics, and all of that is fine. The race courses are simple, but effective, and some of the earlier ones I really liked doing Time Trial runs on, but a few of the later stages were more frustrating to race on in general, since a lot of them love to throw up random dirt piles that slow your bike down significantly, or relied on very sharp turns that while doable with a wheelie, more often than not led to many situations where I’d bump on the extreme edge of a block’s corner while turning, which drove me insane.

The AI also rubberbands per your typical kart racer, and don’t hesitate to use items like the blind one on you. This can be very annoying as well, but at least it comes with the territory and I still found the AI a lot more fair than Super Mario Kart’s cheating racers. At least the opponents here play by the rules and use items you can!

Last up is the multiplayer, which I wasn’t able to test properly for the review period, but I am noting it regardless since it adds a brand new game mode; Chicken Run! Here you race with a friend in a game of chicken and try to stop the bike before it falls off a cliff. I don’t get why the CPU wasn’t available to fight in this mode unless I missed something obvious, but still, this was a fun exclusive little treat if you have a buddy over, and the other modes like Endurance Race aren’t half bad when playing locally, either! Still, this was a big area of Rider’s Spirits I found to be the weakest, since even Super Mario Kart managed to pull off a solid expanded multiplayer experience via Battle Mode.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I had decent fun with Rider’s Spirits. It really, really makes its Super Mario Kart inspiration obvious, but considering how frustrating that game is to play solo, I actually found Riding Spirits to be a slight solo improvement over the Nintendo classic; but compared to other racers on the SNES, it still feels pretty safe and basic, and while you’ll have fun going through the cups, there’s not much here outside of a few bonus modes and competing against a friend. Of all games in Masaya’s catalog, this was the most left-field pick of the bunch, but at least I had decent fun playing alone here compared to the game it wasn’t ashamed to imitate.

Still, when games like Top Racer or Stunt Race FX exist on the same system, it’s hard to argue that Rider’s Spirits tries to approach that high bar, because it just doesn’t. A truly middle of the road, fun obscurity for racer fans wanting to check add another one to their backlog.

I give Rider’s Spirits a 6 out of 10,