There aren’t many games that incite such a level of primal rage in me, that I desire to burn down my house. The Xbox Indie Game,  Little Racers, however, just landed me 25 to life on a count of arson. Alright, so I may be exaggerating a bit. Little Racers is a top-down racing game, where you see the entire track, and control your car driving around. If it sounds too simple, that’s because it is.

Little Racers doesn’t have any sort of story or plot, instead having various modes that you can play. “Quick Race” starts you in a race on a  random track with random cars. “Custom Race” allows you to choose your track, your car,  number of laps, AI level, and so on.  “Championship Mode” lets you set up multiple races, tallying up the points from each race, the winner being decided by whoever has the most points at the end of all the races. There’s also a multiplayer mode, where you can play local, or up to 12 on Xbox Live.

Mind numbingly difficult to drive

The controls are what aggravated me the most. None of the cars have any sort of traction, so it very quickly becomes a “I’m going to bump into every other car and hope to god I can get ahead of them to win” game. I happen to believe my explanation of racing on black ice while your tires are covered in Vaseline is more fitting, I think you get the idea. The handling on the cars is bad. Plain and simple. Some people will love it because it’s “old school” (i.e. difficult as all hell) and they have the “L337 Sk1llz” to master them. But I reckon those are also the people who had the patience to beat Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox.

MC Escher must have designed some of the tracks

The tracks in this game range from fairly easy such as a figure eight, to “what the fuck were they  thinking, I’m not a goddamn robot” difficult. Certain maps literally look like they were taken out of a maze book. For the way the cars control, the harder maps are nearly impossible to navigate with bumping into every freaking wall there is.  None of the maps struck me as good. It was either too basic, or much, much too difficult. It’s almost the equivalent of driving around in a circle in an empty parking lot, or driving to fucking Mordor.

Some Other Points Worth Mentioning…

• While there is customization, it’s not anything to write home about. You can choose from six cars, and change two colors on each car.
• While each car has different “statistics” I didn’t see any real noticeable difference between them.
• The game’s multiplayer mode can be extremely fun if you have the right crowd of people and a bottle of booze.
• The developers take an active role in updating the game, it could improve over time.

You should play this game if…

…you’ve got an extra 240 MS Points you’re not saving for anything else, and you have people to play it with.

Final Score
The game has some pretty big flaws in the way the cars handle, the difficulty of the maps and the lack of choice in your cars.

(What does this score mean?)