Top Racer Collection Review (Switch eShop

Racing game fans who’ve been around since the SNES era are likely to be familiar with the Top Gear series. Developed by Gremlin Graphics (later Gremlin Interactive) as the SNES equivalent of its Lotus games on other consoles, it’s the closest Nintendo’s 16-bit system got to its own version of Sega’s classic arcade game Out Run.

Now Top Gear and its sequel are back – though not by that name – in Top Racer Collection and while their return will no doubt be a joy for the grizzled veterans who remember it from back in the day, those discovering them for the first time may be better suited to the more modern equivalents which hold up a little better.

First things first, there’s no mention of the Top Gear name here anywhere. Presumably to avoid issues with the BBC and its Top Gear TV show – after all, copyright lawyers are even more trigger-happy these days than they were in the ‘90s – the three games on offer here instead have their Japanese titles of Top Racer, Top Racer 2, and Top Racer 3000. And yes, we know there are actually four games in this compilation but we’ll get to that.

All three games have a similar concept: pick a car, start at the back of a grid of racers, and try to navigate your way through the sea of vehicles to reach the front by the end of the final lap. Longer tracks have you running out of fuel, which is dealt with by pitting out or running over on-track elements, depending on the game.

In case it wasn’t clear by its title, it’s Top Gear 3000 – sorry, Top Racer 3000 – which offers the biggest changes, because it ditches the modern locations in favour of a futuristic setting with tracks set across 12 fictional planets and has you driving cars that go at speeds of up to 330mph (but which still look suspiciously like cars from 1000 years earlier). That aside, though, once you’ve mastered one of the games you don’t need to adopt a wildly different set of skills to master the others, since they’re pretty similar.

This new compilation gets around the lack of Top Gear branding (not to mention the first game’s annoyingly abstract main menu) by presenting its own bespoke menu system which replaces those of the original games. You select your campaign, quick race, or time trial modes, pick a car, choose your transmission, and enter your name all through this new menu, and only switch to the emulator when the race is about to start. It’s somewhat jarring and not without some oddly unnecessary loading screens at times, but it at least works.

What doesn’t work at the moment, however, is the game’s online mode. Although it’s possible to create and join rooms for online multiplayer races, neither option has proved successful for us so far and as such we haven’t been able to test a single online race. Of course, this may change once the game is actually released, but we’re now seven years into the Switch’s life, and developers are still insistent on spending time and resources adding online modes to games that frankly don’t need them and aren’t guaranteed to sell enough copies to make proper use of them.

Given that the games use emulation, there are a few basic options regarding screen size and filters you’d usually expect from similar compilations, but there are some issues here. The ‘Original’ size option, which multiplies the original game’s screen resolution by a whole number to avoid shimmering while scrolling, looks absolutely tiny when playing on handheld mode, meaning the only practical option there is to make it fit the screen vertically (though thankfully there isn’t much shimmering to be found here). The CRT filter is also a strange one because it adds a weird wobble effect to the picture that looks more like you’re watching the game on an old VHS tape than actually playing it on an old TV.

Another issue – albeit one that’s no fault of the compilation itself – is that every game on offer here has a choppy frame rate. When you turn on your boost and hit extremely high speeds, the scenery doesn’t really fly past you, it sort of slideshows past you. It can make controlling these sections a little difficult, but this was an issue with the original games, too, so it’s not like the emulation is the problem – it’s simply accurate to a fault.

One aspect of blame that can be levelled on the compilation, however, is the claim that it features four games. As well as the three Top Racer games, it also includes Top Racer Crossroads, which publisher QUByte has previously claimed is “brand new”. Frankly, this is 661 horsepowers of nonsense. Crossroads is merely a ROM hack of the first game, with the car sprites replaced by four different ones from the Horizon Chase series. The tracks are identical, the music is identical, it’s the same game.

Which brings us to our main recommendation. To be clear, this review reads mainly negative because anyone familiar with the original games will already know the enjoyment to be had there. They’re still good games in their own right, and nothing here changes that. If you buy this compilation, you’ll have a fun time with it. It’s just that many of the things that have been added – the odd menus, the pointless online mode, the subpar filter options, the decision to put a fake nose and glasses on the first game and pretend it’s a new fourth one – are disappointments.

If you’re a fan of the originals and just want an excuse to play them on your Switch, this is still worth a look because we can assure you that the gameplay itself hasn’t been messed with. The games you loved on the SNES are still the same games here, and there's still a lot of enjoyable racing action here.

Anyone else who doesn’t have those nostalgic ties with the series, however, would probably be better off buying Horizon Chase Turbo, which is the spiritual successor to the Top Gear series. It costs the same price and offers exactly the same sort of gameplay, but the music (which was made by the same composer) is so much catchier, it runs so much smoother, and it looks so much better.