izigame.me

Instant regret buying this game.

Who thought it would be a good idea to take the concept of Road Rash, strip it of all the color and charm and make it into a super tryhard roguelite? This is a disservice of Road Rash and not what I expected at all.
You are supposed to trek through a randomized campaign of a dozen or so tracks in one sitting, with one health bar, but everything is off. Steering is atrocious, while your enemies will slingshot forward on rails like it's an arcade machine game. Notice how none of the Steam Store materials show any of the game's UI? That's because it's ugly, unreadable jank. There very little explanation of the game's mechanics. Everything looks awful, like a PS3/X360 era game, with a piss filter and bloom and all that.
Your success mostly depends on what kind of objectives you get - for example, your first mission might be to kill a couple of specific enemies. You managed to do that somehow and survived? Great, you can now choose between 6 temporary upgrades like increasing your max health 2%, recover it by 5% or increase a weapon's damage by 5%. But there's no guarantee you'll be able to afford it. You killed only 6 out of 7 targets? Too bad, you get almost no XP and money and your health gets permanently reduced by 25%. But it also might be an easy objective, like "survive", which simply means driving slowly off-road so that all enemies pass you by. Did anyone even playtest this?
The only way to semi-reliably recover health is by killing enemies, but even if you kill a dozen for every hit you take from a gas pipe or a machete, you will still eventually die, because there's countless other things that deal you damage during a race. It's a war of attrition and there's nothing you can do to reliably slow it down. You can block, but you WILL get ganged up on, with a couple of bikes on each of your sides, leaving you with a choice of whether to fight and take a beating from them or to slow down and lose a race so that the game penalizes you anyway. Blocking and kicking only goes so far.
There's no speed gauge, so you never know how fast you're going, but when you're trying to win a race in 1st place so that you're not penalized and at the same time you're fending off 4-5 bikers with melee weapons all attacking specifically you, your life hinges on split-second steering decisions. Didn't make the turn well enough and fell into a canyon? Dead. Didn't notice a cop car going to ram you from behind in your magic rear view mirror on the top of the screen? Dead. You were going on the left side of the road and a car appeared from behind a turn or a slope? Dead. You were going on the right side of the road, but a random car appeared going the opposite direction anyway and totaled you, because randomness is fun? Dead. You made a turn into a problematic piece of geometry that the game didn't like which catapulted you into the air? Dead. And what happens when you're dead? You lose all upgrades bought with money and you're graciously allowed to spend XP on permanent ones. But anything that you don't spend will be lost forever. And the prices are steep. Failed the 2nd race and died on the 4th? I guess you just wasted time, because you won't have enough XP to buy that sweet +5% health.
Maybe this simply isn't a game for me but for 1980s arcade/NES enthusiasts and lovers of endless grind, around which most of this game's mechanics are centered, but I fail to see any kind of fun to be had here and I loved Road Rash. I wanted to check out the "endless" mode too, but the DLC fails to work, the game doesn't recognize that I bought it. It's a waste of time.