A solid chassis to build on

From the first moments of the Downtown Club, I feel like Max Verstappen. I stand on the starting grid, tense my gloved fingers and grip the steering wheel. The countdown begins and my right hand finds the gear knob. Three. Two. One. And I’m ready to race.

After the first lap, another Max comes to mind: my child’s Labrador Retriever who was hit by a car.

An hour after my first terrible lap, it all comes together. The engine screams as I negotiate the corner and pass a slower car on the inside. I enter a long straight that drops below an elevated city promenade. The sun shines through the windows of the office towers to the left and right. The sky is blue. The clouds are fluffy. Suddenly I’m in heaven – albeit a very limited early access heaven.

Downtown Club is a “simcade” racing game that offers both traditional thumbstick controls and fully virtual controls. The latter control scheme allows you to interact directly with the most important parts of the car. Our hands are on the steering wheel, manual gearshift and parking brake, and engaging any of these controls produces the kind of driving response we’d expect.

That’s the game’s big draw. Use your real hand to pull on the virtual handbrake at 80 miles per hour and see what happens. In this way, Downtown Club succeeds in offering the simple, pure fun of direct, responsive user controls. The experience does take some getting used to – grabbing with the handle triggers and accelerating/braking with the index finger triggers requires a certain amount of mental flexibility – but the end result is smiles and a thrill.

If things get too hectic, letting go of the wheel and using the analogue stick will automatically switch you to the more traditional thumbstick control scheme in real time. This takes away some of the novelty, but often the more traditional control method is more reliable and effective.

What is impressive is how the game adapts to our wishes without any stuttering. The change from completely virtual to traditional controls is literally seamless. It is a fluid and dynamic system that gives the player everything they want, whenever they want it.

You can currently choose between four game modes. Events are thematically organized competitions with numerous predefined tracks. Completing them earns you experience points and money that can be used to buy unlockable content. Custom races are customizable races with many parameters that the player controls. Time Attack allows us to race for the best lap times, which are published in online leaderboards. And finally, Free Drive allows us to freely explore the game’s larger map, from which the smaller race tracks of other modes come, at any time of the day or night.

The graphics are beautiful and the aesthetics are stunning. After finally achieving a podium finish in one of the game’s early events, I fired up Free Drive mode to simply enjoy the city built by Commuter Games.

By day, the city looks like Mirror’s Edge and by night, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2. When you go beneath the surface into the relative darkness of the city’s underground tunnels, it becomes claustrophobic in the best possible way. I push my car through the sodium light, the undulating roads winding up and down and around blind bends until I’m at the edge of my abilities.

I break into the sunlight and drive up the ramp to the elevated highway. I glide through the glittering canyons formed by the skyscrapers. The feeling of freedom is palpable. I step on the gas and feel the thrill of speed.

Unfortunately, the game’s status as an early access version is constantly in turmoil. The free drive mode feels sparse and deserted and the event mode is limited. There is only one main location and the resulting race tracks are quite similar. Online play is currently non-existent and there are only three cars in the game, which are almost indistinguishable from one another.

The racing music is terrible. I’ve spent ten minutes trying to think of a way to explain it effectively, and I’m not sure I can. It’s the kind of music that might exist if Shadow the Hedgehog started a punk rock band. It’s brutally repetitive electric guitar garbage.

To be honest, I’ve always been obsessed with racing games with killer soundtracks: the samba from Hiro Kawaguchi’s OutRun compositions, Richard Jacques’ Euro beats from Metropolis Street Racer, and the breezy city pop from Kazumi Totaka’s Wave Race 64. Admittedly, I can’t expect every game to sound as good as these, but Downtown Club needs better tunes.

Also, better AI is needed. The opponents in Downtown Club are paradoxically chaotic and predictable at the same time. They almost always stick to a single racing line and run each race as if they were individual segments forming a kind of monorail. Overtaking them is easy and requires no planning or technique. At the same time, being among them is exhausting and frustrating, as they have no regard for their own lives or the lives of others. If you are in their line and prevent them from being part of their monorail, they will simply roll over you.

Aggressive AI in racing games is fine, especially if your vehicle is equally stable and robust. But that’s not the case in Downtown Club. Your car is a marshmallow and so are its tires, and if unbalanced aggressiveness is the only strategy the computer AI can use, it will get boring very quickly.

I also wish the player cars were more interactive. For example, I would like to have radio controls. It would be nice to be able to adjust the music volume mid-race, or switch between radio stations (assuming the developers produce a more varied soundtrack), or turn the radio off completely if they don’t. I imagine touching the infotainment system and using it like in a real car, adjusting the map on the screen and planning a navigation route that takes me where I want to go in Free Ride mode.

Downtown Club also needs more cars. Who ever heard of a racing game with only three cars? Where are all the cars?! It needs more paint jobs, collectibles, maps, and online multiplayer.

But I shouldn’t complain too much. It’s an early access game and if Commuter Games’ roadmap is to be believed, an upcoming free update will solve all my complaints.

Downtown Club review in progress – current final verdict

The current version of Downtown Club is extremely fun and exciting, but while it has a beautiful aesthetic and serious potential, it’s just a bit sparse at the moment. The full version promises online multiplayer, multiplayer freeride, public lobbies, additional race modes, three waves of cars, and two waves of maps that sound varied and interesting. I have no reason to believe that these updates won’t come, and when they do come, Downtown Club will be a must-play.

UploadVR uses a 5-star rating system for our game reviews – for a breakdown of each star, see our Review policies. As this is an ongoing review, it is currently not assessed to our approach to cover post-launch updates. We’ll revisit this review once Downtown Club is fully released.