Screamer

The 1990s were a golden age for arcade racing games. Just look at Ridge Racer, Daytona USA, and Virtua Racing, all arcade racing games released in the first half of the 1990s. It was a tough market, but that didn't stop the small, newly established Italian studio Graffiti from releasing their arcade racer Screamer for the PC. Although it was clearly inspired by Ridge Racer, it was still a game in its own right and could easily stand on its own two feet.

The following year, Graffiti changed its name to Milestone, as we know it today, and when you look back at the games for which they have become best known for over time - titles such as Ride, MotoGP, and Superbike World Championship - it's easy to forget that they actually have their roots in the arcade racing segment. In my view, Milestone is at its best when making arcade racers, and they proved this with Gravel from 2018 and most recently with Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged from 2023. Now Milestone is back and they're reviving the arcade racer that started it all for them: Screamer.

Screamer is something as rare as an arcade racer with a story. The game is set in the near future and the campaign is called The Tournament, which revolves around an illegal street race organised by the mysterious Mr A (Troy Baker). There are five very different teams taking part in this tournament; among them are Strike Force Romanda, a group of Japanese pop stars; Anaconda Corp., consisting of mysterious characters from the arms manufacturer and cyber-security firm of the same name; and Kagawa-Kai, a team made up of members of a criminal organisation. Incidentally, you get to play as all five teams during The Tournament.

The story is told through a combination of some truly stunning anime sequences created by the Japanese animation studio Polygon Pictures - best known for various anime and science-fiction series and films - and some rather static and dull conversations, familiar from classic JRPGs, where characters stand on opposite sides of the screen with a text box between them. Unfortunately, the latter predominates. The story isn't particularly gripping; it's divided into a long series of chapters, and serves mostly as an excuse to throw the player into a series of fast-paced races of various kinds, often with different objectives to be achieved along the way.

The campaign is quite long, and you spend a fair amount of time sitting and listening to dialogue between the game's rival characters. On top of this comes a rather uneven difficulty level, which makes the whole thing feel decidedly drawn-out. Screamer is, by its very nature, not an easy game, and the difficulty level is unfortunately somewhat uneven. I found that the difficulty level would suddenly drop at regular intervals, only to rise sharply again, which means you hit some pretty steep walls from time-to-time. I found myself easily winning one race, only for the next to require up to 20 attempts, after which the following one was again won with ease. It's uneven and that's a real shame.

In addition to The Tournament, Screamer also offers a wide range of other game modes. There's Standard Race, Team Race, Time Attack, Checkpoint, Score Challenge, Overdrive Challenge, and finally Multiplayer, where you can play in Mixtape (random game modes are selected by the game prior to each race), Ranked Team Race, and Local Splitscreen for up to four players. So there are certainly plenty of gameplay options here in Screamer, and it all takes place across 32 tracks spread across four areas: the neon-lit metropolis of Neo Rey, the scorching Sky Road Desert, the Forest #13 nature reserve, and a fourth secret area, which is only revealed later in the campaign. The tracks are a good mix of winding roads and long straights, but it's a bit surprising that the tracks don't contain hidden shortcuts and the like, which you otherwise often find in these arcade racers.

If you disregard the aforementioned imbalance in difficulty, the races themselves are quite interesting, as this isn't your standard arcade racer. Firstly, you use both joysticks on your controller to steer the cars; the left one is used to turn the car and the right one for drifting. The cars are very heavy and can barely turn, but combined with the ability to drift, they are quite agile. It does, however, take some practice to steer using both sticks, but you get the hang of it and there are a number of assists you can switch on. Some of these assists are so extreme, however, that it becomes difficult to win the races, but at least you don't crash. Again, it's all about balance here.

Screamer has quite a lot of systems, considering this is an arcade racer. All the cars are fitted with an "Echo System", which is absolutely crucial to your success in the races. Firstly, the cars' gearboxes are semi-automatic, which means you have to change gear at the right moment and if you don't, the car will do it itself after a while, but it costs valuable time on the track, time you don't have. If you manage to change gear at the right moment, a Boost meter fills up, and this Boost can be activated in two ways: either giving a standard short boost, or, if you boost at exactly the right moment, a longer and more powerful boost. You can compare it a bit to "Active Reload" in Gears of War, where you have to reload at the right moment to reload faster and get a small boost. In addition to this, there is both a shield and a "Strike" attack that you can activate using the same energy from your Echo System, with the latter causing opponents to explode if you drive into them whilst the Strike is active.

You MUST master the Echo System if you want any chance of winning. I think it's a bit of a shame that the system is essentially forced down your throat in this way, as there's no way around it. If you don't boost, you don't win, and you can practically only boost by making timed gear changes. It's also worth mentioning that the game suffers from severe "rubber banding". This means it feels as though there's a powerful elastic band between you and your opponents, preventing you from ever really pulling far ahead of them, as they're pulled back towards you by the elastic. This means that if you make a mistake, you can drop from first place to sixth place in a matter of seconds, and unfortunately the elastic isn't nearly as strong when your opponents are ahead of you. It's also typically the case that if you boost, your oncoming opponents boost too, and all these slightly "cheap tricks" used to keep the player on a tight leash can be frustrating. It must be said, however, that you CAN get away with pulling out in front and you CAN boost past your opponents, but the game does everything it can to keep you on a tight leash.

You are constantly rewarded with cosmetic upgrades for your cars after every race, ranging from new rims, doors, bonnets, lights, spoilers, and much more, so there are plenty of opportunities to pimp your cars however you like. Funnily enough, there are no performance upgrades of any kind, so if you're not bothered about how a car looks, this part of the game is completely irrelevant. The cars, just like in Ridge Racer, are fictional, but they're designed in such a way that you can still recognise them, as they roughly resemble real-world cars without actually being them.

The visual aspect of Screamer is quite polished; it's very upbeat and everything runs smoothly and fluidly. The game has an anime-inspired look, the cars look a bit cartoonish, and everything is full of moving typography and the like. This does suit the game's very arcade-like nature, but it isn't always the prettiest, and the image quality can sometimes take a hit when there's a lot happening on screen at once. The audio is quite good, with a hard-hitting soundtrack and some fine performances from the voice actors. For some reason, the various characters all speak different languages - there's English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, something that sounds like Dutch - and other languages I can't identify. Yet they all understand one another, and I'm not quite sure what Milestone had in mind here as it seems a bit silly.

Screamer is a strange beast. It's something as rare as an arcade racer (we don't see many of those anymore), combined with a story that almost takes up too much space, as, as mentioned earlier, you spend a lot of time sitting and clicking through conversations between the game's rival characters. The gameplay is packed with systems you can't ignore if you want any chance of winning, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. It might work for some people, but I'd like the option to use Boost when I feel like it, not because I have to.

All in all, Screamer was a mild disappointment for me. The worst part is the sometimes wildly fluctuating difficulty level, which at the start of the game made me fear I'd simply missed something, so I tried various assists that actually didn't make winning any easier. On top of this comes the severe "rubber banding", meaning the slightest mistake can cost you dearly just before the finish line.

I'm left with the feeling that Screamer could have been so much more. If Milestone had just toned down the narrative a bit, added hidden shortcuts on the tracks, and scaled back the numerous systems to simply create a good old-school arcade racer where the pure joy of driving took centre stage, it would have been better.

As it stands, it's a slightly odd mix of fast-paced arcade racing, an unbalanced game, a story that takes up too much space, almost too many systems, and controls that demand a lot from the player. Screamer isn't a bad game, but it tries to do almost too much. I would have liked it to be more straightforward. More like Ridge Racer could have been in 2026.