So, I fire up Riff Racer: Race Your Music!. What do I want to listen to? Riff Racer allows me to select anything from my MP3 files, so I pull up my MP3 list of songs and decide on Gojira’s latest album (Magma). I decide the title track will fit my mood perfectly. Ahead of me lies a neon track, spanning off into the horizon and far beyond what the naked eye can see. The music queues up, the song begins and my car starts accelerating. I deftly maneuver around an obstacle, and then, heart racing, I take a slide around a bend in the track, narrowing missing the rail as I get my car under control, hit a boost point, and go flying off of a jump, only to barely land on the next section of track. Before me waits an amusement park loop which I take at super boosted speeds. The music blaring, the track continues to form before me, the beat and dynamics of the song dictating where the game will take me next. A few minutes later, I cross the blue finish line, having finished with 100% synchronicity, good for quite a few points. I now hold first place on a track of my own creation.




This isnt applicable. The story is really the track and how it responds to your musical selection, and how you respond to the track in turn.




The graphics are quite cool looking. As mentioned in my intro, the tracks in Riff Racer are neon constructed out of and into nothingness. The horizon is ever your goal, and Riff Racer sends you there full throttle in a glowing world of bass, beats, and guitar (or whatever makes up the whole of the songs you select). To an extent, Riff Racer’s graphics are minimal, and yet you cant help but draw similarities to games like Tron, albeit beefed up and modernized.

Overall, the graphics in Riff Racer aren’t mind blowing, but they do look really cool. I would give them an 8 out of 10




This is where Riff Racer truly shines. As a game that creates your experience around the music you select, Riff Racer does an exceptional job of being a dynamic, time and points based solo racing game. You can never see very far ahead, and so you will be constantly reacting to the world as Riff Racer shifts and creates the track based on the dynamic of the music.

There are loops, jumps, obstacles, boosts, and plenty of twists and turns that offer opportunities to not only race full throttle, but also to get your drift on. My own best drift was right at 16 beats. Jumps are also timed, and you score more points based on how many beats your jump is good for. Depending on the angle of release on your jumps, you might also spin in the air, which counts as a trick that also garners you more points. Additionally, any special moves help to fill up your boost meter.


Your boost meter is an essential part of Riff Racer. Basically, boosting allows you to stay ahead of the beats, which is your ultimate goal. You want to at the very least try to stay with the first beat at all times, but getting ahead of it will net you even more points. In addition to tricks, there are also coins and boxes all along the track that will also help fill your boost meter. Finally, there are also boosts along the track as well. The more you stay in boost mode, the more points you will earn. Points will allow you to rise in level, which will earn you bonus coins.

Speaking of coins, you will earn those in each track by running over actual coins and boxes, by creating a track yourself (which, in Riff Racer, means you were the first to drive a track with any given song), by beating existing top 5 scores, and so on. You can use the coins to buy different cars and different skins for said cars. There is a notable difference in the various cars. The skins are just cosmetic.


The controls are tight and fully responsive. Any time you are out of control in Riff Racer, it is because you over compensated, generally as a reaction to having to make some split second decisions. You can of course play the same track over and over, so once a track for a song has been created, it will always remain the same, and you can memorize the twists and turns in hopes of getting better scores.

Riff Racer does what it needs to do perfectly. I give gameplay a 10 out of 10.





The sound is always 100% in your hands in Riff Racer, as it is always determined by your own musical preference. The music playing is always your own choice, and that is 100% the in game sound.

So, this is an easy 10 out of 10 as well. It is exactly what you make of it. You are 100% in control of what you hear.




As a music powered game, Riff Racer shines in every way. Played for hours at a time or a few songs at a time, Riff Racer keeps on giving and giving. You wont ever really tire of the experience Riff Racer provides, and Riff Racer is a game you will continue playing 5 or even 10 years from now. This is what I would consider a must own for any music and/or driving fans out there. Good times will be had aplenty.

audio surf+distance= riff racer

This game is great. Tons of drifting, crazy boosting and just like. Yeah. its great. Most certainly worth the price.

s'good/10

Riff Racer is an extremely enjoyable music based experience. I think the tracks could be more in tune with the music, like the bass lines being jumps or spirals but it has a great feel and I would recommend this game especially when on sale.

This is a bunch of fun! I dare you to beat my Zedd and Coldplay highscores!

Riff Racer is one of the latest in a line of games that makes use of your music as part of its core gameplay, much like the pioneering Audiosurf and the musical shoot-em-up Symphony.

The game plays very much like a standard boost racer a la Wipeout; you steer (the tempo of your music dictates the acceleration of the car), you drift through tight turns and you collect boxes and try to keep within the allotted speed zones to achieve the maximum multiplier possible while avoiding barricades. Once you realise the importance of these boxes as a build-up towards a small nitro boost and the drift function serves as your primary source of score, the game opens up to a very considerable world of competition with a simple premise: risk=reward. Admittedly, the fanbase seems to be quite sparse compared to the likes of Audiosurf making for many barren song leaderboards, but the potential is very much there.

Added to this is the option to collect a form of currency and experience; experience simply increases your rank, each rank increasing your ego that much more and also providing you with a set number of coins per level up to join those you find on the track, by beating other peoples' ghost times or by uncovering a song not yet played by anyone else. These coins are largely used for cosmetic gain in the garage, allowing you to purchase a number of cars and paint jobs. While this does not add anything to the gameplay past very basic HUD changes (the back of the car shows multipliers and box-to-boost progress, bigger cars means they are easier to see), it does provide an achieveable aim, which is very refreshing.

While it follows the same pattern as other games of its type, Riff Racer provides just enough originality and differences to the concept to form a very entertaining and sustainable game under its own merit. I thoroughly recommend it if you are looking for something to accomodate your music.

If you like music and you like arcade racing wipeout xl style... this is your huckleberry, pardner. Saddle up to your steel carriage and ride into the neon electric sunset.

This one of the best music games out there, there's alot of things that could be better but the game is new, I hope further updates will happen. And my anti virus literally deleted the game EXE. wtf?! So now I can't play the game....
Here's a screenshot for proof. https://gyazo.com/29cd99ec537249492bcde3d17c6cc2bc

To start off with, this seems like a game that could be a lot of fun, however there are various things that let it down.

Pros:
-Cool looking graphics

Cons:
-Always online requirement if you want to play tracks you haven't already played
-Few supported filetypes
-Annoying as hell main menu theme
-Tracks don't ever actually follow the music and tend to be kinda flat and dull
-Every single song has the same background, not changing per genre as it should
-Massive grind to unlock new skins and such- just use Cheat Engine