“Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Table Top Racing: World Tour is a Micro Machines inspired racer where you're challenged to race on a variety of different tables with various objects strewn about for good measure. But can it successfully channel the game it so obviously wants to replicate.
Table Top Racing’s concept is as simple as it comes. Race from A to B in the quickest time possible and what could be simpler that that. The nuts and bolts of TTR is its World Tour mode where you play through an array of different events. To stop things getting state very quickly there are a decent variety of events that range from standard races, time trials, elimination races, drift events and pure races, which are just races without the usual array of powerups. There are also special events that you can enter but these are completely separate from the main championship. The only difference between the champions mode and the special events is you can't choose which car you get to drive in and that's it. Pretty bloody lazy if you ask me.
Each event you finish earns you money that you use to buy yourself new cars, upgrades and wheels which I thought was strange until I realised the top wheels have spikes jutting out of them and they make very effective weapons. Other wheels allow you to drift around corners much easier but in all about the spikes and when I had earned enough money I was all over them like a cheap suit.
While all of the events are quite varied and there is a lot of racing to be had the problem lies with the core mechanics of the game. Everything feels bogged down and sluggish from the word go. The cars handle as though they are made of led making them incredibly slow and the steering feels like driving through cement it's that sluggish. I know this isn't suppose to be Forza but for an arcade style racing game it's unforgivable. I thought I could solve the stolen by upgrading my car or even better upgrading to a much better model but I was wrong. Each car handle exactly the same.
To add to the game's woes there is no sense of speed even when you are are full pelt and this goes for all the cars which is very puzzling given how different one car is suppose to be compared to the next. TTR boasts five different themed tables with four courses on each. So with twenty tracks on offer you would expect a great deal of variety between each track no matter the theme but you couldn't be more wrong. It's as if the designers have purposely picked the most mundane and generic designs they could because each track is very basic and feels exactly like the one before it.
I was an hour in and already I was getting bored. The seen it already track design and poor car handling killed Table Top Racing: World Tour very, very quickly. The amount of events on offer were the only thing that kept me plugging on. Eventually I decided to give the online mode a go. When I finally found a game it was stable but lacking any kind of enjoyment because the base game is so bloody boring.
I've struggled to find any plus points and it's disappointing how badly Table Top Racing: World Tour has turned out. It's always a brave move to take a franchise from a mobile phone and try to make it big on console. But when a port is this sloppy you have to wonder why they bothered.
Developer: Playrise Digital
Publisher: Playrise Digital
Website: Table Top Racing: World Tour
Twitter: @PlayriseDigital
Review code supplied by Decibel-PR