Screamer Review – I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream
Way back when I was eight or nine years old, I developed the type of unproven belief that a child in this age-bracket is wont to do: I convinced myself that if cars were controlled not by wheels and pedals, but instead by d-pads and buttons, then kids would obviously be better drivers than adults. Clearly, I was in denial of how many times I outright blew up my vehicle while playing World Grand Prix and Out Run Europa.
Even if games back then looked and ran like games do now, and even if I had better-developed reflexes, this still would have been nonsense. Cars have stuck with wheels and pedals and dials for a reason; probably the same reason that modern vehicles are now scaling back on touchscreen functions. Wheels work great; digital inputs not so much. This is a part of why racing games in arcades, with their chunky cabinets housing pedals and wheels, always felt so premium. Even factoring out vastly more powerful chipsets, arcades provided a driving experience that was, if not more real (let’s face it, these games typically weren’t sims), then perhaps more robust than one could typically have in the comfort of their own home.
The Nintendo 64 did the world a solid by making the analogue stick – which allows for superior steering nuance when compared to digital inputs – the mainstream standard for game controllers, but the fact still remained that the best experiences were reserved for a wheel and pedals setup, which only the sickest of sickos were ever going to invest in. Games where you drive have, by default, basically taken the wheel and pedals that you get in an actual car and tried to tape them to a gamepad or (even worse) keyboard. It’s worked well enough.
That said, while my experience of playing Screamer has had its ups and downs, it is nonetheless to the eternal credit of the developers over at Milestone that they took their long–dormant series and then thought to look at the modern, twin-stick video game controller, and wonder what might happen if they stopped trying to fully emulate actual cars, and instead built a driving system around the thing that every console came with in the box.
If you’ve read any preview coverage, then you probably already know what the big deal is. If you haven’t, then the gist is simple: Screamer utilizes a twin-stick steering system. The left stick handles typical turning, while the right is assigned to drift. It sounds fiddly, but it only takes a couple of races for it to start becoming second nature. It almost feels like this is the first racing game to be really, truly built for a controller; the cars in its world being of the kind that school-aged me dreamed of. Screamer reworks how cars are literally steered, and it takes fewer than ten minutes to get adjusted to it.
Is it actually an improvement? Meaningfully, maybe not, but it works, and it does so without crossing any wires in the player’s brain.
It’s important to state clearly that the basics of driving fast in Screamer are actually incredibly approachable. In fact, the game knows that it’s tying some things, and it is loaded with accessibility features and customisation options. These range from considerations for colourblindness all the way to an adjustable tinnitus filter. It’s an excellent first step, and one that is followed by a perplexingly clumsy second one.
Screamer presents itself with an openly anime aesthetic that nonetheless allows some more Western drawing sensibilities to sneak in around its edges. It has a Japanese theme song, and the opening title verbally says ‘Screamer’ with a distinctly Japanese accent. At least, it did for me. The accent changed the second time I cold-booted the game, and then again on the third. The reason for this is a pretty cool aspect of a less-than-awesome thing.
Fundamentally, Screamer is broken between its tournament (story mode) and an arcade mode that features a whole host of racing options and driving challenges. The tournament is where play kicks off, though, and… well, it’s a thing. It starts off with a reasonably well-animated cinematic that quickly yields the main stage to… mouth-flappy character stills talking over background art. I can deal with budget-friendly options, but there is a notable lack of imagination put into this presentation and it is frankly painful just how restrained these character illustrations are in their poses and expressiveness; I don’t know which manga inspired this, but I clearly haven’t read them.
The way the portraits are proportioned and faintly move around on the screen, too, brings to mind cardboard puppets held up on sticks, only without the quirky charm that actually doing something like that might have infused into proceedings.
These scenes are over-written, under-produced and painfully devoid of charisma. It’s neat that the story bounces between the perspectives of multiple racing teams, and I did enjoy the silliness of the prize for this ‘Screamer tournament’ being 100 billion dollars, but the creative thinking that went into the steering system is sorely missing from the presentation. It is neat, though, that the narrative leverages the futurism of its world to explain that everyone has a translation chip installed in them and so each character speaks their native language freely. This includes corgis.
Finding Your Audience
It feels a bit strange as a criticism, but it's difficult to know just who Screamer is for. The team at Milestone clearly wanted to create something welcoming, and the suite of accessibility knobs and dials is excellent. It’s just that, even if the difficulty gets ironed out, the story itself acts as an age-gate. It takes a fun and silly premise that could absolutely be quite charming and would likely appeal to the typical fifth-grader (you know, the type that might find an anime-inspired combat racer appealing), and pumps it eyeball-full of profanity and some horrifically misguided attempts at being edgy.
Still, these narrative scenes can be skipped. The far bigger sin is that, for all of Screamer’s accessibility features, the A.I. difficulty is completely out-of-wack. It’s been patched at least once pre-release, but even so, setting the tournament difficulty to ‘story-focused’ and indulging some driving aids isn’t enough to stop progress from becoming far too difficult to expect most typical players to put up with.
This seems like a fixable issue, and ‘too difficult’ is an improvement over ‘absolutely absurd’. Milestone has promised further balance patching post-release, and I sincerely hope that the people there manage to improve it to the point where the above paragraph feels kind of silly. Screamer’s storytelling may be a lost cause, but there remains legitimate scope for the tournament to become meaningfully better.
In the meantime, Screamer is salvaged by its arcade mode. While the tournament is where new mechanics are supposed to be onboarded, these can still be adjusted to outside of it and, importantly, just zipping around a series of random races, time trials and various challenges still unlock not just cosmetics, but also additional courses and characters.
Yes, characters. Not cars. People. Screamer’s rethinking of how vehicles behave doesn’t stop with twin-stick controls. Forget about things like variable top speeds, handling and breaking ability, too. The characters separate themselves from each other with special abilities or buffs that are perhaps more akin to what would typically be found in a fighting game or hero shooter. These, of course, lean heavily on Screamer’s wider range of mechanics. One character may get a little oomph to their boost, another the occasional free attack.
In other words, yes, Screamer has nitro and car combat mechanics. While there is some silly, proper noun-loaded lore, it all essentially comes down to there being charge meters for boosting and combat abilities. Boosting includes timing of semi-automatic gear shifts (communicated visually, but also through some nicely subtle controller rumble) and an actual, well… boost. Combat includes ramming attacks (‘strikes’; a kind of mini boost in themselves) and temporary shields. Charge enough up and you may end up with an all-out overdrive mode.
It all adds up to a lot, especially when you consider that holding the boost button needs to be timed properly to get the full juice (and heaven help if you miss this a couple of times, because the A.I. sure as shit won’t). Even by the standard for arcade racing, Screamer is a persistently active experience. With all functions switched on, gameplay is a positive flurry of fingers around the controller, almost to a detriment. While Screamer’s core steering mechanic is great, it can be difficult to keep thumbs on both sticks at all times when myriad shoulder buttons are demanding attention every couple of seconds. Little wonder there’s a control assist that simply holds down the accelerator for you.
Nonetheless, the core experience of racing in Screamer is excellent. Ignore the story and a regular arcade race will provide a highly-customisable and more fairly-balanced experience across any course, including unlocks from the game’s ‘secret’ fourth location. Team races can work wonders when battle is factored into scoring. There are also things like checkpoint races, and score challenge adds as a kind of mini campaign buffet of modes with a credit scroll at the end. Considering that characters and their vehicles are, by virtue of each having their own associated buff, biased towards either boosting or battle, time attack is perhaps a weird one. Notably, though, it is an excellent way to familiarise yourself with the tracks and spot the odd shortcut that might be just a bit too well-hidden.
The main challenge with these shortcuts is that the visual language that hides them isn’t particularly distinguishable from actual blockades. This is a part of an issue that plagues a good number of the tracks. Screamer is at its best when speed can be built up, corners flung around, and there’s enough width for cars to jostle. Tracks that lean into bottlenecks, or slower paths of tight twists and turns don’t play out so well. The quasi-cartoon aesthetic is also somewhat squandered here, in part because it’s just not nearly as interesting to look at as you might expect, but also because a number of tracks fail to meaningfully contrast the actual racing path against the foreground and general scenery, hurting course readability.
For all its quirks, I do hope that Screamer finds a regular and loyal fanbase. The story may be naff, and some tracks are better than others, but there remains an enjoyable core at the centre of it all. The potential for online play, particularly in all-out team races, is highly promising, but it’s a promise that can only be fulfilled if Screamer can entice enough an audience to purchase and persevere. It’s an excellent, flawed, unique, undercooked racer that just may yet manage to become a simply great one.
Screamer was reviewed on a PS5 Pro with a code kindly supplied by the publisher.
