Hot Lap League: Deluxe Edition Reviews

4/10

It's a Trackmania clone. About the only thing I can praise it for is the art direction and customization. The cars look nice and the environments feel alive. Something that Trackmania fails at with how liminal feeling a lot of the environments there feel. While the customization aspect is neat, it is rather limiting. All you get is preset color choices with no option of using your own custom color set up. Any paint jobs or color combos you can use are locked away by either completing the maps or by grinding gold which is slow and tedious. Car handling feels weird where at times it feels grippy and predictable and others it feels delayed in terms of steering. It's sort of apparent in the drift model they have for the cars. Sense of speed is not great. It feels very slow in and out of boost despite the speedometer reading 400kmh. It really feels like you're only going 200kmh tops. Maybe slower. Sound design is not great. The soundtrack is generic modern EDM and the cars sound like they're revving too low for the speeds you go at in game. Each of the car designs don't have unique sounds to them either and reuse the same sound per environment type. You're better off getting any other Trackmania title over this. It's a shame, because the art direction the game has screams something of a modern 90s styled arcade racer akin to Daytona USA or SCUD Race / Sega Super GT. It's just disappointing that its relegated to a Trackmania clone that's mediocre in execution.