Every once in a while you get an indie developer that you can count on to deliver a bang almost every time. New Star Games is one such developer, having already scored well on Nintendo Life in the past for New Star Manager (which scored an 8), Retro Bowl (9) and Retro Goal (8).
Along with its Switch releases, it’s also responsible for a bunch of fantastic mobile games, including the likes of A new football star series, New Star Cricketand Baseball’s new star. Basically, everything New Star touches turns to gold, but it’s also fair to say that it has the style of play it’s best known for: retro-style sports games.
With New Star GP – named after an old top-down racer it released years ago – the studio opted for something very different from the typical output fans are used to. Instead of going with yet another 2D style sports game with ‘lifestyle’ career options, it stepped out of its comfort zone and delivered a polygonal F1 racing game that’s more Virtua Racing than Virtua Striker.
Fortunately, the results show that New Star Games is more than a one-trick pony, and New Star GP is just as fun, engaging, and more than anything the developer has released before. However, it has one rather annoying flaw that needs to be pointed out.
First though, good (and there is plenty of it). The game has two main modes: Championship and Career. First you have to choose an F1-style car – you can play as a typical model from the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s or 2020s – and then choose a manufacturer to get the color that suits you best.
You can work your way through a series of multi-race championships, each ranging from three to ten races, and offering a themed selection of the game’s 34 tracks. One championship, for example, is called the Hill Climb Track Cup and focuses on tracks that have a good proportion of inclines.
Championship mode is a good option if you’re just looking for a quick jump and play through a few races, but Career mode is where the main meat of New Star GP lies. Like many other New Star games, it’s more focused on guiding you through a long racing career and juggling various other external elements.
Your career begins in the 1980s, and you work your way through all five decades playing through a series of races, racking up points along the way in typical F1 style. However, what differs from the usual F1 routine is that instead of setting times in qualifying sessions with empty tracks, it instead makes things more fun by giving you an optional separate race with a different set of rules, which you can take on for bonus cash and trophies before moving on to the race itself. the main race.
These optional challenges can be checkpoint races (where you must drive through a certain number of checkpoints before time runs out), elimination races (where the last runner is eliminated when time runs out), time trials (where you must complete a certain number of laps within a time limit), or what you already have. Nothing here is revolutionary by any means – if we had a coin for every racing game with an elimination race type, we could afford our own F1 car in real life – but instead it at least adds some variety to being ‘qualify, race , qualify, race’ ad nauseam.
It wouldn’t be a New Star game without some sort of management aspect that takes place outside of the actual playing of the sport, and New Star GP is no different. Here you have to keep your team happy as each one provides different perks, but that means there are situations where you have to make tough decisions that will inevitably upset some of them.
If you screw up a race and fail to finish on the podium, who are you going to throw under the bus if someone interviews you and asks who is at fault? Will you point the finger at the engineers and risk the possibility of them leaving the team, resulting in the loss of certain perks that improve your car’s performance? Or will you blame your commercial manager and risk making less money to win? Again, it’s hardly a master’s degree in psychology, and none of these mistakes will change the game to the level of Telltale, but it’s a bit of fun that it remixes the usual racing game routine of winning races, upgrading cars, and repeating until it maxes out.
All of this wouldn’t be for nothing, of course, if the game itself wasn’t actually fun to play, and luckily, New Star GP doesn’t disappoint. Most part. Taking clear inspiration from Virtua Racing, the basic polygonal graphics give the game a similar clean, stylized look to Sega’s core arcade racing game, and things look nice and sharp whether played on TV or in handheld mode.
The handling is satisfying and challenging enough without taking things too seriously, meaning you can not only power through corners with the gas pedal stuck, but also have some freedom to cut corners and crash into opponents without it instantly interrupting your race. It’s a delicate balance to walk, and the New Star does it with gusto.
The main issue we have is that no matter which of the many camera angles you choose to play with, the game struggles with frame rate. It runs much smoother on other systems, and while other multi-format games would suggest you’d expect performance to drop on the Switch, the low-key art style means we have to wonder if there’s more room for optimization somewhere.
While we appreciate that there’s a higher level of detail here than in the Switch’s Sega Ages version of Virtua Racing, the fact that the port runs at a flawless 60 frames per second, while this one struggles to maintain any real stability, means that if you play a Sega game then move straight to the New Star’s, the latter feels sluggish and less polished in comparison. To be clear, it’s not like it drops to 15fps or anything like that, and it’s still perfectly playable, but it’s noticeably choppy at times.
Still, that’s just one significant problem in an otherwise great racing game, which pays homage to the early days of polygon racers while still offering enough ideas to stand out on its own. Fans of New Star games curious about how different this looks from the typical team can rest assured that the same level of compelling ‘one more go’ gameplay continues to take pole position here.
