Screamer Review - Achieves the Need for Speed or a Total Burnout?

Barely Magic Mike
2 minutes ago
10 min read

Are we screaming for more?

A game like Screamer gets me intensely excited for a couple of reasons, ironically neither of which has anything to do with the original Screamer games from the 90s, which I never played and had never even heard of prior to giving this modern reimagining a spin. Don’t hate me; hate my youth.

Anyway, the first reason for my excitement is I’m a massive fan of the PlayStation 2-era Burnout titles (especially Burnout 3), and virtually nobody makes games quite like them anymore. Not literally nobody, mind you, as indie studio Three Fields Entertainment has given it a go with titles like Dangerous Driving and Wreckreaction, but with unfortunately middling results. And if you squint, you can spy hints of Burnout DNA in modern iterations of the Need for Speed franchise, but those games are so AAA slop-ified at this point that the comparison is all but worthless. In my opinion, it’s not a great time to be a Burnout fan.

And the second reason is because of the developer at the helm. Milestone, while boasting a portfolio filled with a large variety of racing games both realistic and not, was the developer of the Hot Wheels Unleashed series – two of my favorite modern arcade racers, where drifting felt fantastic and the sense of speed was phenomenal. They hardly replace Burnout since nothing like crash mode exists in any of them, but the sheer intensity of the racing at least gave me a hint of those vibes.

In comes Screamer, Milestone’s latest foray into the arcade racing subgenre, which aims to reimagine this old series with some robust mechanics prioritizing high speed, tricky drifts, and an emphasis on taking out your opponents that reminds me of games like Burnout, Split/Second, or Blur. Let’s see how it did.

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of Screamer’s mechanics, I need to spend some time covering its story. Yes – this is a racing game with a story, and not the kind tossed in as a throwaway excuse to make you listen to cringey dialogue written by Gen Xers pretending to be Gen Zers in order to stitch together the races in the most half-assed way possible (looking at YOU, Forza Horizon and Need for Speed). Screamer’s Tournament mode, which is the heart of its surprisingly vast array of available content, is broken up into short chapters that feature both visual novel segments and gameplay segments that could be full races, time attack modes, or just short tutorials. Even if you’re not interested in Screamer’s story, you’ll still want to start here, since not only will learning to play the game properly be crucial before the game’s challenging Arcade mode or trying the online modes. If you’re truly not interested in the story, all the cutscenes are thankfully skippable.

While I could see this structure frustrating some people who wish for a more traditional campaign mode with lots of races to jump right into, the story here might surprise you. Taking place in a vaguely-defined future filled with heavy cyberpunk influences, you play as members of five different teams who have entered the Screamer tournament – a fierce competition simmering with violence enabled by a mysterious piece of tech called the ECHO.

The ECHO, when installed on each Screamer’s vehicle, not only gives it the array of abilities needed to compete fast and fight hard, but brings the driver back from death every time they crash in a fiery explosion. So far so anime, and I’ll leave it to you to learn the intricacies of the ECHO in the context of Screamer’s plot. But the overarching story here is a really compelling way to add momentum and stakes to Tournament mode that most racing campaigns don’t have. It gives a lot of character to each of the five teams as their motivations, friendships, and rivalries weave an increasingly complicated web throughout.

This is helped tremendously by high-quality voice acting all around, and writing that feels campy when it wants to be (like my favorite line of dialogue, “You just entered a certain chocolate factory, and things are about to get wonk-y”). But it can also be intriguing when it needs to be, believe it or not. Although I wish more of it could have been told through its cutscenes rather than still images of characters talking to one another, it’s easy to see that the volume of dialogue here would have made that a difficult proposition. Racing fans, I encourage you to keep your mind open to the idea of a racer with a proper plot, because I think many who choose to engage with this one will not be disappointed. There is enough dialogue for it to at least partially qualify as a visual novel though, so be warned about that. If there’s one knock I have against Tournament mode as is, it’s that there are some pretty frustrating difficulty spikes at the moment, albeit ones that Milestone is seemingly aware of and has informed me they’ll be patching closer to launch. So, while I do feel the need to mention it for the sake of conveying my own experience, it’s likely this will be fixed. And in any case, there are multiple difficulty options for the racer AI that can scale better to your own preferences.

Screamer’s take on arcade racing is a tale of surprising complexity. As with many racers, a controller is highly recommended here for a proper experience and accordingly, I used an Xbox controller throughout my playthrough. You’ll accelerate and brake your car using the right and left triggers, respectively (no surprise there). But the first surprise is that drifting is handled by the right analog stick, which can be pushed left or right at any time to angle the back of your car until your tires start squealing. I’ve only ever seen this type of drifting in one other racing game, 2020’s Inertial Drift, and it’s great to see it again here as I was always surprised more racers didn’t adopt it. This control scheme will take you some time to get used to, as my opening hours were spent slamming into a lot of walls before I truly understood the delicate interplay of drifting, acceleration, and braking necessary to perfectly drift around a sharp turn. The skill ceiling feels very high here and I’m nowhere near the top of it, but once my brain got the wheels in motion, pun intended, I was very much onboard. Even so, I did find some cars felt a little too slippery for my liking. It’s completely possible that I needed to acclimate better to their profile of strengths and weaknesses, but the amount of slamming into walls I did after executing what I thought was a perfect drift took me by surprise at times. This is especially true for rainy tracks, where I could handle sharp corners in-game about as well as I handle ice skating in real life. Poorly. Very poorly.

Accelerating, braking, and analog drifting are just the baseline here, though, as you’ll need to take full advantage of every ability Screamer gives you to beat some of its tougher races or, in Arcade mode, literally any races. As you’re darting down each track, you’ll be building energy in two meters shown at the top of the screen – the left one being Sync, and the right one being Entropy. Tournament mode introduces these abilities slowly, with it being a few hours before you so much as begin to interact with the Entropy mechanics. But I’ll cover it all at a high level here so you know what you’re getting into.

For starters, gear-shifting in each Screamer car is what I’d describe as semi-automatic. You’ll see the gear you’re in shown at the bottom-left of the screen, and as it edges up its blue zone into the orange zone where it’s about to shift up, you have the option of tapping the left bumper to shift up manually and perform what the game calls an “Active Shift,” which gives you a quick boost for your trouble and fills up a chunk of your Sync meter (which I’ll get to in a second, don’t worry). This mechanic is technically optional but really useful, and gives you enough of a boost that utilizing it effectively will be key to staying competitive.

As you drive, shift, drift, and draft behind your opponents, your Sync meter fills. Each time a segment of it is available, you’ll briefly hold the left bumper to activate your boost. This is par for the course in many arcade racers, but Screamer adds a twist where releasing the boost button at the perfect time will give you a “Perfect Boost,” which pushes you faster and lasts noticeably longer than a standard one. You’re probably noticing a pattern here – Screamer is a racing game that heavily rewards you for paying attention and activating your abilities with precision. And this is where it gets the upper hand compared to a lot of arcade racers out there, because while the learning curve can initially feel a bit steep, especially if you jump right into Arcade mode (which I don’t recommend), learning to use its mechanics as designed feels incredible.

We’re not nearly done, though, because Sync can also be used to shield your car briefly in the case where opponents might be trying to crash you off the track. Using Sync abilities in any form will then, in turn, build up your Entropy meter, which is highlighted in pink at the top right of your screen. And Entropy is crucial for fighting back. Just like with Sync, there are a couple of ways to use it – one is a Strike, which gives you a brief burst of forward speed that can ram you right into an enemy, which will immediately destroy them in a satisfying explosion that gives me nostalgic goosebumps from my days of Burnout 3’s takedowns (minus the crazy crash cams, unfortunately). But let’s say you decide not to use your Entropy bar to fuel strikes and instead build it up all the way – now you can enter Overdrive, which is Screamer’s ultimate ability – it will shield you for a brief time, make you go incredibly fast, and make every opponent you slam into explode. At the same time, though, once the shields fade out, you’ll still be going very quickly, and crashing into a wall means a quick and dirty demise. It’s a cool ability, but one to use at your own risk.

Phew. That’s a lot to cover. Screamer is not a simple racing game, and understanding how to use its abilities to their fullest will definitely require some hands-on time if you didn’t completely follow my explanations. Trust me that when everything clicks and you’re seamlessly balancing Sync and Entropy abilities, it is a phenomenal feeling. My only real critique on those is that the default control mapping of the Strike and Shield abilities to the right bumper is a strangely terrible decision. Activating each of them requires you to do one of two things: A. Take your finger off the accelerator and thus slow the car down (why would you want to do that?), or B. Get your hand into an awkward position where your middle finger is accelerating while your index finger charges up the Strike or activates the Shield. Thankfully, remappable controls are here to save the day, and mapping the strike and shield to the X button felt significantly more natural and had an immediate effect on my skills in the game. I highly recommend it to anybody as one of the first things you do when you boot Screamer up.

Tournament may be the heart of Screamer, but it’s far from the only mode of play available. Outside of it, you can go to Gage’s Workshop, which allows you to customize Screamer vehicles as you see fit. I’m not someone who cares much (or at all) about customization, but if I put myself in the shoes of one who does, I could see being a little disheartened at just how much cosmetic content is locked behind progress in Tournament mode, completion in various challenges, and random pulls from completing Arcade Mode races. You’ll have to make significant progress in Screamer before much of anything worth customizing unlocks, but once you do, there are a fair number of options there. And hey, at least they’re unlockable in-game and not through microtransactions.

Arcade mode is where you can participate in a variety of events you’ll have encountered throughout the Tournament, such as a standard race, Team Race where your score as a team is what determines the winner, Time Attack, Checkpoint mode where you’ll be racing against the clock with time added for each checkpoint you pass, amongst others. It’s also where, as a solo player, you’d be testing how much you fully grasped the game’s mechanics in Tournament mode, because on standard difficulty, arcade mode is tough. I often had to fight my way pretty hard to even something like 9th place in a 15-person race, though this depended quite a bit on the character I chose. Each character has some kind of perk that differentiates them on the road, as well as a unique car. And at the moment, the game is certainly due for some balancing, as I could barely manage 14th place with some characters and yet was consistently placing 1st through 3rd with a character like Gabriel, whose car’s base speed is so lightning quick that I could practically forego drifting altogether and bounce off the walls like a giant pinball to get ahead of much of the competition. Perhaps not the intended way to play.

There are also online and split-screen multiplayer modes to round things out. I couldn’t find a match online to test it out during my review period, but am definitely looking forward to seeing how the online experience shapes up once the game launches. Even for strictly single-player folks though, there is plenty of content here.

Screamer’s presentation is great overall, with some cool environments to race through and a bombastic visual style that has sparks shooting from your vehicle as you activate a Sync boost, explosions everywhere as opponents ram each other, and a general feeling of barely-controlled chaos that adds a lot to the vibe. While I did find the playable tracks in each environment to be fun, some of them looked a little bland and didn’t stand out as much visually. There’s enough variety to generally not get too bored, but certain scenery could have used a bit more stylish art direction to make it pop. I already mentioned the voice acting is great, but the music also holds its own with a mix of fast-paced synths and rock music where appropriate, never failing to match the frenetic intensity of each race.

Overall, Screamer is a great time. It’s one of the few games that I can see myself playing for quite a while even once this review is complete, with tons of compelling content only held back by some minor speed bumps. And I have to say, for a racing game, it has a surprisingly interesting story that’s absolutely worth paying attention to. Any fans of combat-focused arcade racers like Burnout, Split/Second, Blur, or Hot Wheels Unleashed are likely going to have a great time with this one and will find plenty of reasons to play it for dozens and dozens of hours.

Pros:

Tournament mode is very robust

Story is surprisingly interesting

Core gameplay loop feels fantastic

Great soundtrack

Both split-screen and online multiplayer

A plethora of different modes to choose from

Cons:

Occasional difficulty spikes (actively being patched)

Some tracks feel a little visually bland

Certain cars’ handling feels too slippery

Customization is pretty limited early on