80's Overdrive asserts that Out Run's combination of breakneck racing and frantic traffic negotiation will fit neatly inside the progression-focused model of a modern game. It doesn't, and 80's Overdrive almost runs out of gas before it reaches a comfortable destination. All the lavish neon and thumping synthwave in the world can't help 80's Overdrive make twenty minutes last six hours.
Out Run was a foundational moment for racing videogames. Yu Suzuki’s 1986 classic used Sega’s Super-Scaler technology to produce one of the most visually arresting games of its age. On top of its novelty cockpit cabinet and player-selected soundtrack, Out Run also offered the fantasy of driving one hundred miles-per-hour in a Ferrari through the European countryside. Gliding through traffic, managing outrageous speeds, and trying to beat the clock, all simple objectives by 2020’s standards, were perfectly suited to the 80’s arcade scene.
80’s Overdrive is in love with Out Run. It drops the player in one of six cars and deposits them on traffic infused road courses with nine other racers. Driving over the median slows your speed, veering off course crashes your vehicle, and careening into opponents is duplicitous fun. While 80’s Overdrive doesn’t reproduce Sega’s Super-Scaler aesthetic, its parallaxing horizons, roadside ornamentation, and checkerboard asphalt all awaken memories of Out Run’s arcade purity.
Complications arrive when 80’s Overdrive starts doing anything that isn’t directly borrowed from Out Run. Its solution to the challenge of length (a successful trip through Out Run would last six minutes) is to develop a world map of courses and outfit its cars with a series of progression mechanics. Players can win races to earn money to upgrade the engine (speed), handling (control over steering), and bumper (damage absorbed and the car’s ability to recover from collisions). Each of the three categories is subject to nine upgrading levels. Players can also save up their money and buy different looking, identically-performing cars with those upgrades already on board. By the end of 80’s Overdrive’s thirty-seven unique courses, it’s essential to be driving a maxed out vehicle.
80’s Overdrive also introduces fuel and repair mechanics to Out Run’s play space. Fuel is self-evident; the player will always have enough gas to make it through one race, but money has to be spent between races to top off the car. Repair is a means to correct the damage percentage acquired from bumping into cars and running into trees at full speed. I think the damage percentage also affects car performance, but I was never sure. The cost of fuel is manageable, but the price of repair is often alarming. Early on, at least a third of my prize money was consumed by repairing my vehicle. The first few hours of 80’s Overdrive, where the player has to escape this pattern, have the potential to be a tedious grind.
On paper, 80’s Overdrive’s economy and progression mechanics make sense. It’s 2020 and it feels like almost every game features rote campaign. In practice, however, 80’s Overdrive’s decisions range from boring to frustrating. Early on, the money grind to upgrade a wretched car demands replaying several courses. Those same courses are subject to AI opponents and traffic patterns that, with a lowly vehicle, make winning more a product of weird luck than applied skill. Paying the entry fee, repairing the car, and gassing the car can empty a wallet and even force the player to make $50 with a tedious car washing point-and-click minigame.
More trouble is always in 80’s Overdrive’s rearview mirror. Police cars occasionally appear and make two or three runs at the player before they disappear. Sometimes, but almost always inside extended three-lane turns, they will come up from behind, make contact, and drive the car off road and into a tree. Basic traffic is also subject to unpredictable 45-degree lane changes, all but guaranteeing some kind of speed-killing collision. If you’re early in the race with plenty of time to catch up, this usually isn’t a problem. If you’re nearing the finish line, everything you’ve done has now been a waste of time. The prize money for any place after second or third usually isn’t enough to cover the expense of (and the repair from) entering the race.
All of 80’s Overdrive’s slights against player comfort build an inclination to restart the race, penalty free, after experiencing the slightest setback. Spinout on launch? Restart the race. Smash into a tree? Restart the race. Find yourself with 40% damage? Restart the race. It’s faster, it usually costs less, and it resets the battleground to neutral. The systems that 80’s Overdrive, when perceived as exploitative and unfair, are now subject to be gamed by the player instead. It’s not worth your time or effort to play 80’s Overdrive under the directed guidelines.
Ironically, I enjoyed 80’s Overdrive the most after I had finished upgrading every aspect of my car. I bumped off traffic with slight but manageable penalty, I had enough speed to catch up to my opponents after mistakes, and I hand enough control over the steering wheel to evade tricky police cars. 80’s Overdrive only feels right with a fully kitted car and anything below its optimum settings feels like deliberate methods to make its cars perform shittier. It feels like 80’s Overdrive started with the fully-upgraded car and then thought of ways to only make the experience worse at the bottom of the ladder. You’re not buying upgrades, you’re getting back to normal.
All of this leads back to 80’s Overdrive’s Time Attack mode. What I assumed would be a series of timed races was revealed to actually be an Out Run-style arrangement of tracks with branching paths. It even adds a neat mechanic where the player has to nearly miss traffic to add one to three seconds of time onto the clock. This was great! I wish I had only done this and never messed around with the campaign, but I had to go through that campaign to get a car where it needed to be for a good run in Time Attack. Time Attack, unabashedly, is where 80’s Overdrive completes the Out Run cloning process.
The hook with 80’s Overdrive—or at least what caught my eye and pulled me toward it—is its practiced ode to 1980’s neon excess. Electric blue water, teal checkered grass, fuchsia skylines, and rows of bright autumnal trees are in no short supply. Every environment is appropriately garish and pretty. Likewise, the synth-heavy soundtrack from Vocoderion, Wolf and Raven, Vectorwolf, Angst78, Aceman, and Karolis provides the perfect aesthetic compliment. This isn’t original, games have been neck deep in 80’s trappings since (at least) Blood Dragon and Hotline Miami nailed it to a wall, but it’s pleasing to experience all of this in the form of Out Run.
Some of 80’s Overdrive’s shortcomings may be mitigated by its price tag. It’s $9.99 which, even after its 2017 debut on 3DS, isn’t an unfair amount of money. As a game, and what you would want from modern take on Out Run, it’s disappointing. As a good-enough way to spend $10 on an afternoon, it’s alright. One could do worse, but picking up M2’s SEGA AGES release of actual Out Run for two fewer dollars feels like a wiser investment.
80’s Overdrive asserts that Out Run’s combination of breakneck racing and frantic traffic negotiation will fit neatly inside the progression-focused model of a modern game. It doesn’t, and 80’s Overdrive almost runs out of gas before it reaches a comfortable destination. All the lavish neon and thumping synthwave in the world can’t help 80’s Overdrive make twenty minutes last six hours.
