Lightfield HYPER Edition Reviews

This game is like if TRON 2.0's Light Cycle Races, Rush 2049, and Descent and Forsaken had a bizarre lovechild of a racing game that was 100% hopecore and ditched all the weapons in the spirit of the first two Tony Hawk and Dave Mirra games. Oh yeah even crashing doesn't kill you, you just lose all of your momentum and have to shake it off. Now the controls are deceptively simple. There is one stick and two controls: "Snap" and accelerate. All the ABXY buttons are snap. Right trigger is accelerate. Let go to increase your turn speed and perform stunts, and you also need to "jump" before you can properly perform stunts by pulling back on the stick and then letting off "snap" - but jumps count towards your stunt. You can drift (while "snapped" to a surface), backflip, ledge jump and roll to 90 snap, 360 backflip to perfect landing, and even 720 to 180 snap. There's also a few handfuls of named complex stunts. Now if you need the game to play faster or slower, that is available outside of multiplayer. Faster gameplay is good for exploration mode, because you won't always have a constant stream of surfaces to accelerate on. There is a fully loaded campaign full of basic races with extra requirements, challenges, and exploration runs defined by speed. Don't be affraid to reset an exploration challenge because the star it chooses is far out of your reach. Graphics. This game uses what appears to be a lot of well-made, pre-baked lighting, probably because it was originally made for the base model XB1 console, before the S and X. This game contains a buttload of optimization, so it's going to look good and play good on basic systems, and if you have a 4k machine it's going to look GOOD. That being said, the levels are huge graphical shout-outs to a hopecore-esque TRON-like places with vibrant colors. Even some non-TRON weird levels like some old mine. There are multiple planets/stages with multiple levels per planet/stage, so there is a consistency with the themes. The theme of the HUD and GUI reminds me a little of the PS1 wipE'out" games, where you have text placed sideways and none of it goes to waste - all the little tooltips and flavor text means something. Oh, and the default pause menu is part of the main menu, making the game experience exceptionally streamlined. It really is a gorgeous and polished game both in mechanics and graphics. The soundtrack is also actual Electro/IDM. Drum n Bass is everyone's go-too, but I liked it a lot. It does fit the vibe the game is going for. That and anyone can join at any time. If you are at home, someone can pick up a controller and join. One of the few true splitscreen racing games in modern times besides BallisticNG. Literally my only gripe with this game is that it doesn't let you use the racing music with exploration. That's it. Well worth 15 bucks. I would pay 20 bucks for this tbh.