Sport of Kings. Royally Awful Game.
One of the great things about being a reviewer is that you get to play some outstanding and enjoyable games. On the flip side of that however, sometimes you end up reviewing a game that warrants a poor rating, and Horse Rating 2016 without any shadow of doubt falls into the latter category. There may be a gap in the market for a good horse racing game, but after playing this effort from Yash Future Tech Solutions, you’d rather that gap had gone unfilled for a little longer.
You start by naming your horse and jockey, then choose your horse from a choice of 6 that will unlock as you progress through the game. The single player game takes the form of a Championship that is split into 10 seasons, and each season comprises 5 events. Each season starts with a Time Trial, which is a race against the clock, then the rest of the races are a mix of Straight (a short sprint), Normal (slightly longer involving going around a bend or two), or Hurdles (more of the same, but with the odd fence to jump). Each race is mercifully short, in fact it only takes about 6 or 7 minutes to complete a season, meaning the whole game including the Finale can be completed in less than 90 minutes.
Before each race you have to stop a skill meter in the right place to get a good start, but its so ridiculously fast that’s its down to luck rather than skill if it goes well. Then you are off, propelling your horse by mashing the A button and pressing LB to jump any hurdles. You can get an extra speed boost by whipping your horse at certain points by pressing RB, but if you do that too much the horse becomes enraged, stops running and decides to lie on its side in rigor mortis like fashion, thus ending your race. The shorter races are fairly easy as your horse's stamina meter never runs out, but anything longer than 800m and your horse will likely slow down allowing the rest of the field to gallop past.
The graphics on the game look laughably dated to say the least and although the animation of the running horse looks ok, its devoid of any character and steers more like a boat than a living animal. The only variety in the look of the tracks is shown by just changing the backgrounds and the colour of the ground, green for grass, brown for dirt and white for snow. The game tries to build some excitement with some loud fast paced music during the races, but you can’t help thinking the tracks sound like the rejects from some speed run platform game from about 20 years ago. They try to impress with a choice of different camera angles, but all but two unplayable and would only be good for replays, which you don’t get.
It only takes a few minutes for every race to seem like a repetitive grind, and although you get points for your position each race that work towards a season and championship total, its fairly pointless as during the race you have no idea which of your opponents is which so you get no sense of rivalry.
Once you’ve stuck it out to the end of Season 10 you progress to the finale, where for some reason a couple of show jumping events are thrown in, the idea of which are to jump fences in any order you like, aiming to finish with the highest number of fences cleanly jumped. In the 55th and final event of all you finally see a bit of variety with a cross country race along a winding course, which means, yes, you actually get to turn left!
When I saw the retail price for this game I assumed the decimal point had been put in the wrong place, and even if it had I would still question its value for money. There’s probably a market for a good horse racing game on Xbox One, but with its clunky mechanics and shoddy graphics, this game is woefully short of fitting the bill. I can confidently say Horse Racing 2016 is by far the worst game I’ve ever played on this platform, and in fact I would struggle to find anything of less merit if I went back two generations to the original Xbox. Avoid at all costs.
Game: Horse Racing 2016
Developer: Yash Future Tech Solutions
Publisher: Yash Future Tech Solutions
Genre: Horse Racing Sim
Price: £23.99 (from Xbox Store)
Many thanks to XCN for providing the revue copy.