Circuit Superstars, a more than meets the eye and surprising enigma of a game, for better or worse, is a racing simulator. Yes, a simulator. I was just as surprised by this Original Fire Games title. Coming into this, I thought it would be some sort of Mario Kart-style game, but oh how wrong I was. Published by Square Enix Collective, this racer is a barebones, no flash, straight-up racing game, and that is exactly what you do. Race. Racing is the name and personality of this sim. Want a story campaign? How about racing instead? Everything in this game is purely to finish first and do it the fastest.

There are no achievements to gain. No whacky cars to unlock. No wild helmets to try on. You are here to win, beat and maintain your ranking. This caught me off guard. I was expecting an arcade feel with a bit of silliness, but this turned out to be completely the opposite. While looking like an arcade game, the number of technical aspects added to this racing sim is immense.

What you would expect to find in the flashy realistic racing games you can find right here. How much your vehicle weighs determines maneuverability, braking while turning affects your speed, cutting corners or using the barriers causes time penalties, and crashing or hitting other vehicles causes damage.

Unfortunately, there is not much of a campaign. What you do get is a series of races in which you can not save or even leave and come back to where you left off. You have to restart. Hopefully, this gets updated as it causes you to commit to a large amount of time for one series set. The campaign for me was like a long and grueling tutorial as the AI is harder to beat than any players online. They always hit those corners with amazing accuracy.

Online play will be where this game shines, though I was only able to queue up and then race with a couple of people instead of a full lineup. For heavy competitors and motorsports gamers, I think this will really evaluate your skills, as there are several leaderboards to claim the top spot in.

Right now you’ll see a lot of the same names in each top ten, each sporting times I could only dream of at my current skill level. Do not be discouraged though, as hard as it is, practice is the name of the game, finding new techniques, understanding the perfect times to brake, turn, when to overtake, or using the pit stop when it will be the most opportune moment for your position.

There are cool little extras to this game and the pit stop is one of them – your vehicle will run out of gas on those 10+ lap races, so choose when to re-fuel wisely as this can decide whether you are first or second. In my case, last or second last. There are small cosmetic colour and pattern changes you can make to your cars and avatar, but it is really basic. The hardest thing for me to understand in this game was the turning.

Unlike most normal race sims where the camera follows behind, it leans more into the arcade-style where is just top-down and follows along but does not change when you turn. So, when you are driving top to bottom of the screen and you need to turn left, it seems like you may need to turn right based on what you see on the screen, but it is still left on the controller, almost like driving an RC car towards you. This took a while to fully get, but after a few races, it was easier and felt less unnatural.

This is a high-potential game that already seems to have a solid following, and now with console players able to join in the fun, it stands to become even more favorable. Even though it is not my style, I can see the appeal that the competitive and the race fans will see in this. Making it onto the leaderboard will be a pretty huge deal and impressive to any gamer. The constant improvement opportunities players will obtain with the time they spend on this will cause constant rank changes and encourage you to improve.

Written by: Adam Brasher