the fastest racing game since garfield kart 2

This is a great game! Honestly I went into this completely blind and I came out very happy with my experience... Can't wait for whatever comes next!!!

I’m not an F-Zero fan but I was compelled to try this game because I’ve been following LakeFeperd's work since 2015, back in the days of his trilogy of Sonic fangames. That said I am a fan of racing games in general, and in that regard XF more than delivers. It's also his most ambitious work by far and it...shows, both in good and bad ways.

The star of the show is ultimately the Arcade mode, and for that by itself I think the game is more than worth the current price tag. It’s what you would expect: you pick one of several cups (each of which is based on a planet in the Solar System, with a few exceptions), pick a character, and you race. In Arcade mode there’s 10 characters with unique vehicles, ranging from Shell and his all-rounder White Kestrel to Wolfman with his handling and acceleration-focused Crosswinds, to The Survivor and his tanky, boost-focused Never Centauri. Most characters are locked by default however, so you’ll need to complete the cups at increasingly high difficulties to access them all. Plus there are also an additional 4 secret cars normally reserved for the filler NPC racers you can unlock, though personally I’m not even remotely skilled enough to beat the cups at Beyond difficulty lol.

The core gameplay feels great; it’s all about chaining together your boosts, hitting every boost pad and blitzing through the tracks as fast as possible, yet at the same time the mechanics are a lot more technical than at first glance. Once you get to the later courses, you need to learn how to finesse your way through the tracks, learning how to strafe and sometimes even brake and corner to navigate turns without crashing into everything. (Personally, I’m still quite bad at not crashing into everything though.) There’s a ton of tracks totaling up to almost 60 overall; sometimes it admittedly starts to feel like quantity over quality, especially with the more gimmicky and simplistic layouts like Ringatron or Mobinaria, which both mostly feel like driving in a straight line while you hit every boost pad you can. Some tracks also play with other concepts like ‘zero atmosphere’ zones where your boost is disabled and you can accelerate infinitely…which sounds cool but ends up being annoying because even the slightest mistake gets severely punished with little way for you to recover. It also breaks the balancing of the game by making acceleration the only stat that matters (in other words Wolfman dominates here). Thankfully there’s only like 3 tracks that heavily rely on this mechanic, with smaller implementations in others.

Outside of Arcade you also have the Story mode, which is…rather unusual for a racing game. This was an aspect of the game I was very intrigued by before release but the final implementation was…very undercooked. In the story mode you can only play as Shell, who is essentially the game’s protagonist, and as a trade-off the White Kestrel is now customizable. I’m not going to try to describe the whole story so to put it simply: it takes place on the Nomad, a city-sized space station that travels through the solar system, and it’s about Shell facing off against Cingul, a mysterious, malevolent racer with supernatural powers. The player needs to build up Shell’s strength to defeat him and uncover his true nature. Along the way, the other XF racers get roped into Cingul’s schemes and some…interesting things happen, to say the least. Frankly, the plot felt like an unstructured mess that had very little to do with the actual racing…basically the opposite problem most racing stories have.

Mechanically the story follows a calendar system – the narrative plays out on a day-by-day basis from December to October of the next year. Every activity consumes 1 day and you have a few options normally. Most importantly you can visit the Proving Grounds, an explorable hub where you can partake in Night Races, which earn you cash and sponsorships that increase your income (and allow you to upgrade you Kestrel), and the Proving Grounds Challenges, which are just a series of tutorial missions. You can also access the challenges in Arcade mode so there’s no point in playing them here; IMO, it would have made sense for them to work like license tests in Gran Turismo where they gate the players access to higher-level Night Races. On some days you can even talk to other racers in the Proving Grounds who give you extra events to play in…unfortunately this aspect mostly disappears by like April in the story.

The other major activity are No-Go Zones, areas of the Nomad that are infested with criminal scum. When you go here the gameplay shifts entirely away from racing to a beat-em-up platformer, and it's…surprisingly fun? It basically feels like the gameplay of Spark the Electric Jester, but slowed down to a walking pace. You want to rack up as many points as you can by defeating enemies and grabbing collectibles, and in reward you get XP to upgrade Shell’s stats. This mainly matters because at several points in the story, you are forced into unique No-Go Zones and boss battles that use the beat-em-up gameplay. So for that, you want to be prepared.
Aside from those main points, your other activities are a ‘daily activity’ which essentially skips a day and gives you a random reward, a part-time job which also skips the day and gives you money, and simply going home which skips the day entirely. Some days of the month are also ‘burn days’, periods during which the Nomad travels to another planet in the solar system and no activities can be done. Generally this precedes the actual main cups from Arcade Mode, which are also a part of the story’s…tangential relation to the XF tournament itself.

So all this sounds pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, it just gets super repetitive. There’s simply not enough stuff to do to fill out the game’s length with only 6-ish unique Night Race courses and 8 No-Go Zones. I already cleared and played all of both events by like…May, at which point I was just repeating the same events to earn more money and XP. By the endgame I was skipping most days entirely, and the story itself increasingly skips large numbers of days for narrative reasons as well. Not only that but the cool details that made the world feel alive, particularly being able to interact with your fellow racers organically in the Proving Grounds, increasingly fall by the wayside as you progress the game. Ultimately this sprawling RPG-esque mode was way too much for one person to handle, considering it’s known that Lake cut vast swathes of content from the story mode to be able to release it last month. I loved the vision of it, but the actual execution of was…rather disappointing. I’m not even getting into the plot and writing itself, this review is long enough already and that would probably double its length.

So overall I think XF is a great game, but like I was getting at in the start the game’s ambition was simply way too much to be executed well. It left me disappointed because due to this game’s poor sales, we will likely never see a sequel that improves on its issues either. Still for 12 dollars it’s worth it just to play Arcade mode and listen to the game’s banging soundtrack while you race. So, I would definitely recommend this game regardless of its issues. And if nothing else, the story mode gives you a taste of a fascinating vision I really want to see iterated on in a future game someday.