Junkyard Rush Racing Steam Charts & Stats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxpQAohFQK0 Arcade racers are one of those golden genres for me like shmups, beat 'em ups, and RTS where if someone makes a new one, I will be there checking it out ASAP. So I was quite interested when this dropped on Steam at the end of December, but its $20 pricetag was too high to consider for a complete unknown with very few reviews. Just a month later it dropped to $10 and $5 on sale, and you bet, I'll spend a fiver to take a chance on new arcade racer. On the positive side, this game is really built out with many tracks, cars, car upgrade items, and race modes. There's a lot here and it feels enjoyably old school in that way, back when games used to be mostly single player focused. Also, it looks pretty good. Sure, I guess you could classify these graphics something around the level of "high end mobile gaming," but that's fine. They won't dazzle you but look just fine on a 4K screen. The downside, unfortunately, is the driving physics themselves, which is the one thing you really have to get right. Now, they're not *terrible*, but there's two flaws to them that stop this game from being legit good and instead keep it in mediocre territory. First is the braking system. Whether regular brake or handbrake, both are dramatic and don't work like you'd expect. The regular brake stops your momentum almost completely no matter how fast you're going, and the handbrake jerks the car wildly. And not in a powerslide manner as you'd expect, but again it sends your car to a halt and when combined with your steering into a turn, you can suddenly go from, say, a 2 o'clock direction to 10 o'clock in the blink of an eye. That just doesn't work, it's unusable. As you can see in my video above, I started off at first trying to use the brakes around corners and constantly crashed into walls and finished last. It's in later races when I learned to not use brakes *at all* and just let off the gas for corners and then I was consistently finishing 1st. The other problem with the driving physics, which isn't as dramatic as the braking problem, is the cars don't have enough weight. Well, at least the starter car doesn't, perhaps others do. When you crash into a wall your car doesn't just sit there like it should, it bounces back, and often in a different direction than it was originally facing. This makes those occasional crashes and spinouts that much more difficult because sometimes you'll end up facing in the wrong direction entirely. But the developers of this game already gave the controller system a fix a couple weeks after the game came out, so who knows, maybe they'll continue to tweak it. Because if they alleviated those two issues, for me this would turn a mediocre game to an actual good one. 6/10