Super Street: Racer | Review | Switch

by Danny Bivens

All about that quick arcade action. 

Super Street: Racer is a fast paced arcade-like racer that is reminiscent to the games of yesteryear. It starts you out with a cruddy car and tasks you with building up this bucket of bolts into a vehicle that will be feared on the streets. While the game features a very realistic look and quite a bit of customization options, the game sticks to what makes it good - the controls - and doesn’t deviate from that. So, how does it stack up on the Switch?

With Super Street being an arcade racer, the controls here are simple. You accelerate and brake with the triggers, use nitro with A and use the hand brake for tighter cornering with the B button. Right from the opening tutorial of the game, I felt right at home with the controls. Once you have the basics down, you’ll be drifting around courses and winning races in no time.

While there are several modes on offer here  (Quick Race, Multiplayer, Garage, Car Collection), in order to beef up the beater car you start out with, Career Mode is where it’s at. Here, you have twelve different cups to go through, each containing anywhere between five to six races per cup. It’s more than just straight up racing, too. Sure, you have staples such as regular circuit races and time trials, but other race types, such as Joy Ride, Eliminator  and Boss races keep things fresh.

To top that off, players are encouraged to take out opponents during the races. This leads to some pretty nasty looking crashes that feel awesome to be a part of. Crashing and scraping against walls isn’t discouraged in the slightest here, either. Even if you crash your car, you will be able to continue from the point where you wiped out. Heck, by the end most races, my car would usually have doors and the hood knocked off. The arcade feel carries over as you don’t have to worry about repairing any of this between races. Everything is back to normal after each major crash and/or race.

Winning races in each of these cups nets you XP that unlocks more races. Not only that, but you also get currency that can be used to upgrade the various parts of your car. When it comes to upgrades, there really are a lot of things to tinker with. I’m not really a car guy myself, but it was really cool to see this level of customization, period, let alone with actual car part makers (some of which I’ve never heard of).

You can definitely spend a lot of time customizing your car in the game to make it look and perform just the way you like. When going through the customization, I did notice one thing - upgrades are kind superfluous beyond the initial purchase of a part. To break down that loaded statement, let’s say you want to upgrade your tires. After going into the tire menu, you’ll see a ton of tires from different makers that all look unique. One thing that is not unique, however, are the stats. The first upgrade gives you the same stat line no matter if you choosing a set of tires that costs 3,000 versus ones that cost 300. For more casual gamers, that might make things a bit easier as they wouldn’t have to weigh as many options when thinking about the upgrade. They could just buy the cheapest part to get the best bang for their buck, which is what I did. Conversely, if you’re going into Super Street: Racer looking for deeper customization with each individual part offering something different statistically, you are going to be a little disappointed here.

Visually, Super Street isn’t going to knock your socks off. While the engine provides a pretty realistic look, you will notice some of the textures on the cars (especially when they get up close and personal) are a little bit bland. Backgrounds are in the same boat, too. BUT, when it comes to performance, the Switch version doesn’t skip a beat. The game runs very smoothly and I can’t recall any issues during my time with the game. A bit more cleaned up visuals would have been nice, but I’ll take a smooth framerate any day. Keeping on the topic of aesthetics, the sound here is also very well done. The cars all sound realistic and I really dug the soundtrack here, ranging from deep bass techno/rap to a few more upbeat tracks.

Super Street: Racer on the Switch is a pretty solid game that really surprised me. It has great controls, offers a lot of customization options and runs smoothly. On the flip side, some of these customization options, statistically speaking, are superfluous and the graphics are a bit on the muddy side. Regardless of these gripes, Super Street is a fun arcade racer that is worth checking out.

Final Score: 8.0
Review code provided by the publisher.