Re-Volt Review – Flipped Off By Physics One Time Too Many

While you were a tingle in your dad’s testicles, I was busy buying up as many Sega Dreamcast games when it was first launched, owning all the official Dreamcast magazines, peripherals including the steering wheel and keyboard, and almost purchasing all the games. Re-Volt was one I missed.

The Dreamcast wasn’t so popular in my friend group – only one other person had one, and as I had so many games, I was understandably the host of game nights in the winter. I don’t know why I didn’t pick up the game originally, as we used to love Micro Machines and similar titles, so now it’s on the Switch 2; I thought, why not?

As good as it is to try new things (don’t experiment in college if you want to avoid scandals in the future), I have no regrets; I loathe this game. Ok, I’m writing this immediately after bailing on it after repeated failures, and while I’m still lucid, I’ll take the diplomatic route and advise that I’m not scoring this review.

What I’ll do instead is continue to describe and moan about why I don’t like it, but not poo-poo on it for the sake of it. Nor will I tell you not to buy it. I don’t do stuff like that, and considering I am definitely in the minority (as reviews are typically positive), only read this for a different spin on Re-Volt.

Slow Out Of The Blocks

One of the reasons for not giving a score is also my bias towards combat racers. I don’t typically like them, but love racing titles. If there’s a way to wing it and get through on skill and nitro alone, fab. At least with this, you needn’t worry about random online players trolling you. That’s what the AI is for.

So, you begin with a range of options that include a single race as well as championships. Diving straight in, I thought selecting the arcade mode would be a quick race (it’s actually the default difficulty, not an arcade mode). What surprised me was how slow my car was in comparison to the others. From the get-go, I was always playing catch-up.

Even going full speed with all of the starting vehicles wasn’t enough to get deep into it, as I was either targeted by a firework, would collect an item that would blow me up unless I tagged another car (painfully far away), or, more commonly, flipping the car over on a curb or last minute at the finish line. I can’t stress enough how much this flipping would happen at the last minute.

Flipping Ridiculous

Regrettably, you need to finish in 3rd to qualify in the championship – something I’m quite consistent with in racing games in normal modes, sometimes expert, but even switching to the humiliating easiest setting still prevented me from qualifying in races. I don’t mind admitting that I would often restart a race on racing games like Gran Turismo if I took a corner a bit poorly to get it perfect, but with Re-Volt it was because of the frustrating physics and unfair difficulty curves.

Bear in mind I’m the type who’d rinse licensing challenges in games such as Assoluto Racing to get all golds (where achievable); my time spent with Re-Volt was just painful, and I didn’t have the patience to stick with it, and yet another reason why I can’t give a full verdict.

In fear of just being crap at the game, I handed it over to my kids to try. Lo and behold, the first thing the youngest one says is it’s unfair that other cars race off ahead, come back lap you then blast you. The eldest went back to TikTok.

Maybe It’s Me. Maybe It Isn’t

This wasn’t something I expected from a game that has a decent fan base, nor an experience I wanted to persevere with, despite my interest in racing games. Perhaps I’ll come back to this at a later date and re-evaluate (and for context, I haven’t had a bad day/week).

What I suggest you do in the meantime, which I don’t doubt you do anyway, is read/watch some other reviews as my opinion is very different and I’d hate to put you off something you might potentially enjoy, played back in the day, or perhaps you even developed it.

Now I’ve calmed down, I’ll reaffirm that I don’t loathe Re-Volt, I simply didn’t enjoy it.