Slipstream - Another retro inspired racer, but this time reviewed by Thermoptic!

I'm going to get straight to the point, if you love old school arcade racers, beautiful pixel graphics and drifting then you need to keep on reading! Slipstream was successfully funded on Kickstarter back in 2016. It was presented as an racing game that drew inspiration from the old games from the 80s and early 90s and it definitely shows! You can clearly see that the classic arcade games like Outrun and OutRunners was a big inspiration for Slipstream. The game is now finally released and we just had to try this out!

Slipstream was created by the freelance artist and indie game developer Ansdor and you can see that he has put a lot of energy to capture the authentic feel of the old arcade racers adding the pseudo-3D sprite/tile scaling combining this with beautiful and vibrant scenery and sprites. When you first start the game and see the menus you are presented with a colourful and 90s inspired look and feel and it all just looks so good!

What I loved about Outrun on the arcade was that when you played it you had to go through a period of trial and errors figuring out the game but after a while you suddenly where passing by cars and clearing corners without thinking and Slipstream has managed to capture this perfectly! And driving like this in extreme speed with smooth 60fps gameplay just feels amazing! But what makes Slipstream even more thrilling is the addition of drifting and yes you guessed it.. slipstreaming :)

Im a sucker for drifting in games so I was really excited to see how Slipstream handled the feeling of drifting and I must say that the creator nailed it! The game has a little tutorial mode where you can try out the drifting and at first I thought it was quite hard to get a hang of the timing but just after a couple of tries I were drifting around without any problems.

Slipstreaming didn't work like I imagined it would. In driving games slipstreaming usually gives you a subtle speed boost when placing your car right behind another car but here you instead have a little bar in the right corner that fills up when you are behind another car and when the bar reaches max you instantly get a superboost that lasts for a couple of seconds and if you can extend this boost by slipstreaming behind other cars. I actually liked this even more and fits perfect with an arcade racer like this.

Slipstream has a couple of different game modes that adds some more replayability to the game. The standard Arcade mode is just like Outrun, and the end of each level you have the option to select the next area by either turning left or right through the form of a fork in the road. But you also have the Grand Prix mode that is a championship with five races that you have to clear. Every level has five laps and when you finish the race you earn money to upgrade your cars stats. Its a nice addition to the game if you want some variation.

In addition to these different game modes you also have a selection of five different cars with its own stats. Oh and if you press up and down when selecting a car you can get a selection of different color schemes for the cars and one of them has the colors of the famous japanese drifting car Toyota AE86 :)

And I also have to mention the amazing 80s inspired synthwave soundtrack that fits perfectly with the game. The soundtrack is created by Effoharkay and you can purchase the entire soundtrack in mp3 here.

What you get when playing Slipstream is an arcade experience. Don't expect to get a deep racing game with car modifications and other stuff like a modern game. You can see that Slipstream was designed and meant to be a game that takes you back to the good old days of arcade racing and this is exactly what you get and I just love this!

Links :1) Steam

Posted by @Thermoptic