Thanks to Arc System Works for the review code

Title: Gotcha Racing Second
System: Steam
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 07/18/2018

Presentation

From a glance, Gotcha Racing Second looks like a typical flash game due to the way everything animates, alongside some pretty basic looking menus and graphics. It definitely has a low-budget feel going to it, and while it does stick strictly to 2D artwork, Gotcha Second still looks incredibly bleh, and the same goes for the music, sounding a lot like the upbeat songs which would play in the Family Tennis series (though by default, this is blocked out by engine noises and such)

Gameplay

The main goal of Gotcha Racing Second is to build your own vehicle out of randomly generated parts (obtained from the titular Gatcha machine), and use your car to win the races and grand prix courses to move up ranks.

It’s a fairly basic racing game, playing from an overhead perspective, and the controls are decently tight, allowing for the game to feel very comfortable to play with the Steam Controller. You can accelerate, brake, and use a special action that depends upon the parts of your car. (I recommend sticking with a speed boost for this) However, while you do need to earn money to compete in each Rank’s grand prix, (usually done by clearing practice races) the gameplay loop quickly deteriorates into boredom.

Like most other racers, each track has their own amount of laps, and while the controls may be solid, none of these tracks ever feel as if they have anything significant to offer whatsoever. Each of them looks and feel incredibly generic, and once you build a car with good handling and acceleration, you’re pretty much set. There is a challenge mode, and there’s also time attack trials (which do have online leaderboard support, for some replay value, although the leaderboards are pretty barren), but neither of those offered anything to deviate from the norm, nor provide any entertaining track layouts. In the end, I found myself giving up of sheer boredom after the very end of the second tier and messing around with the other modes, which makes this racer pretty dull overall.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Gotcha Racing Second is a racing game that reeks of genericness. Barebones presentation, generic music, boring track layouts, and little reason to keep more than one vehicle around, since you can replace your worst parts with better newer ones and just keep improving on the vehicle you already have.

I assumed the reason I never gave this much time back at launch was due to my backlog, but upon picking it up again in recent weeks I quickly realized it wasn’t just that, but also the desire to want nothing to do with this racing game when I could easily play a better racer like Overtop or Virtua Racing on my Nintendo Switch. Even now, when the game occasionally goes on sale, I can’t really recommend this game that well.

I’d actually much prefer Arc go back to that quirky concept they had on the 3DS, where they made a little racing game called VectorRacing which was like Virtua Racing, but with a cool throwback to Vector-style games. I think a sequel to that would be a lot more entertaining and could offer plenty more fun than this game did. Regardless, you should probably pass on this course.

I give Gotcha Racing Second a 4 out of 10.