There’s something truly exhilarating about sprinting. Running as fast as you can feels dangerous, somehow. Every bump makes you wobble a little on your feet, and at max speed you’re doing more to control your momentum and inertia than you are to actually propel yourself along the ground. You become a mass of fleshy limbs that dart about, a split second away from tripping and bouncing across the concrete. You’re unlikely to meet an untimely end by tripping while running, but in DeathSprint 66, it’s a good chance – that’s the name of the game.
DeathSprint 66 feels like a cross between a platformer and a racing game. As a speeding clone, you’re on a track with other racers, all jockeying for position – literally pushing and shoving – while constantly facing death. The track is littered with laser grids and squeaking gears that will leave fleshy clones splattered all over the track.
When you’re locked in, focused on getting the best position and time, it’s similar to other platformers that emphasize speed and precision. Like Neon White, you’ll be replaying courses over and over again to achieve the fastest, cleanest lap times. And when you’re locked in, sliding on rails and shimmying to avoid death at every turn, it feels incredible.
But that’s where DeathSprint 66 starts to fall apart. Racing games, for the most part, are almost meditative experiences. There’s a certain level of self-satisfaction that comes with every PR lap time, and then you can brag about it to others online. Even Mario Kart, with its randomized items and nonsensical track designs, has a sense of predictability. You know what items spawn in which positions, and what the counters are.
However, DeathSprint’s unique movement and platforming aspects defy what the best racing games have managed to achieve. It feels like an intense platformer – as I said, death is around every corner – and crashing into obstacles resets your character, setting you back a few positions. It feels brutal in a way that falling off the track in Mario Kart doesn’t, and it slows your momentum drastically as other players race past you.
As a speed-based precision platformer, DeathSprint has everything it needs in terms of movement and the types of obstacles you need in the levels. And if that’s what DeathSprint was, I think I’d love it. But instead of having, say, 80 short stages to sprint through and get the best time, the game has a handful of racetracks that are meant to be replayed, raced, and traversed over and over again, in different modes, against different opponents – and it just doesn’t work.
Rolling around DeathSprint 66’s course is tense, and I say that as someone who seeks out challenges. There are so many hazards in the way, and every time I veered off my usual path, I was outsmarted by another one. You learn where they are and how best to avoid them in time, but that highlights a larger issue: I don’t enjoy rolling around this course over and over again. It feels like picking a stage in a platformer and grinding it out over and over again, and even after you’ve completed it, you’re constantly grinding it out. It’s meditative in the relaxed time trials that you pick and choose when to play, but that’s about all there is to DeathSprint.
There’s a “PvE mode” where you can indulge in activities like: running around a track and through rings, running around a track but beating a “hype score,” and running around a track but dying less than five times. Yes, it’s all about running around a track. The same track. Over and over again. Believe it or not, the best of all is running through the rings, as each ring acts as an arcade-style race checkpoint, adding seconds to your timer.
The PvE challenges are disappointing, but the ones that focus on “hype score” are really confusing to me. You earn hype score as you run around the track, but what exactly that score does is a mystery. All I know is that, according to the online leaderboards before launch, no one has actually beaten the hype score required to complete the PvE challenges. I hope that’s not true, but after trying it a few times, I not only feel like I’m wasting my life, but I’m not beating it.
While in PvP, which really feels like the main thrust of the game, you’ll be racing against other players, sprinting to push them into dangerous spots, and collecting items scattered throughout the course. Lightning bolts are everywhere, which add power to your boost, which you can use to gain speed, while 66 tokens are scattered throughout, giving you Mario Kart-style items, only more brutal. Instead of green shells, how about spinning chainsaws?
Again, like Mario Kart, you’ll gain better items as you lag behind, including an attack that feels like a Bullet Bill, but unlike Mario Kart, you can’t tactically hold items behind you, or send them backwards to punish players who hug your butt.
It feels like the game should be a tightrope walk between a group of equally skilled players, but in the games I played, that wasn’t the case. I came in first a few times, I came in the middle a few times, but other than when the game actually started, I rarely saw anyone else. Even when I was charging ahead, jumping from fourth to first, I wasn’t sure where my opponents were. Were they on a lower level and I just passed them? Did they crash into a grinder and explode into chunks of meat? I don’t know – but I always do in Mario Kart.
It feels unreadable in a way that most games in the modern era don’t. I have to admit, I’m colorblind, and I didn’t play with any colorblind mode available. Normally, most games are fine without changing anything, but here I was shocked when I finally saw the chainsaw icon following my character. The cyberpunk style and flat shaded icons just made the game unreadable.
And we know I’m tired of the songs, but they feel so uninspired. There are 15 songs in total, and they’re all depressing, dystopian-looking songs, but there’s no variety. The future doesn’t have a beach or an arena in the sky or something? All we get is a dark, gloomy cityscape? I had to flip through the tracklist to remind myself, and all 15 songs are literally a bunch of rundown buildings with different colored fog to differentiate each neon-lit song from the others. The only reason to memorize them all is the hassle.
The game could still work, perhaps with far fewer obstacles, and more players to fill the wide, empty tracks. You don’t need gory deaths to punish players, slowing them down is fine. Make my clone stumble and fall, forcing a hasty recovery, instead of just splatter my blood and guts on the wall. If it’s going to be a racing game, it should work like one, but the mechanics and tracks feel more like The Pilot’s Gauntlet in Titanfall 2, only with other pilots trying to complete it at the same time, which ruins your game.
There are moments in DeathSprint 66 that feel great, but those moments don’t involve you running laps for the 50th time or getting pushed off a cliff by a player you couldn’t have predicted. If this game had unique levels for parkour-platforming and timed gameplay, it would be a slam dunk. Yeah, I basically wish this was a different game altogether, but it honestly feels like wasted potential.
DeathSprint 66 could have been an amazing platformer, but it ended up being a disappointing racer.
Score 5/10
Platform: PC
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