Stampede: Racing Royale is hurtling toward release next month, with the Steam Early Access launch coming on 2nd November for PC. That means there’s just one last chance for Sumo and Secret Mode to squeeze in a final public playtest, and that’s exactly what they’ve decided to do this weekend – head to Steam to join in now. So what is Stampede: Racing Royale? Is it the Mario Kart battle royale that is sounds like?
There’s a lot of games that look to blend two or more genres together, these days, though the ‘but battle royale’ category has remained a particularly difficult nut to crack. Nintendo has probably done it best over the last few years, as they’ve blended the nostalgia bait of their classic NES and SNES games with player counts many times higher than four, but even they have shut games like Pac-Man 99 down after a period of time. For a new IP to stake out a spot in the live service arena is tricky at the best of times, but Stampede: Racing Royale’s core concept of battle royale kart racing certainly has legs… I mean, wheels.
At its heart, this is a solid kart racer that really isn’t trying to do anything too far being a well-rounded example of the genre. There’s an inherent familiarity with modern Mario Kart, Crash Team Racing and others, and the pick up and play nature of these games gives Stampede a bit of a leg up – a car jack up? – on other more keenly competitive battle royale genres like first person shooters.
Stampede ticks a lot of boxes for the kart racing gameplay. Alongside simple to grasp controls you have boost pads, items like missiles, shield and nitro, drifting (with a boost that builds up after a few seconds), slip streaming, and all the usual features that are pretty much always found in these games. The big different is that there’s a whole ‘herd’ of 60 players all sprinting to get to the finish line first.
Keeping things nice and snappy, each match is broken up into three distinct races. After each one, the backmarkers are eliminated, before a fresh race starts and the remaining players get to push further toward the final round race for victory.
It’s an interesting way to do it, compared to knocking players out one-by-one as in an elimination game mode – that would probably take much too long. The restarts mean that all the remaining players are bunched up again for a fresh start, similar to Fall Guys, so the playing field is re-levelled and a wonky start to a race in the first round doesn’t necessarily cost you. And if it does? Well, you’re knocked out pretty quickly and so you can dive into matchmaking again.
Behind the scenes, there’s an effort to always make this as fair and even-handed as possible. This is going to be a free-to-play game with reward tracks and cosmetics, but they’ll always just be cosmetic without even a hint of pay-to-win. Similarly, any fears of Mario Kart-style rubber banding can be put to bed, with more of a reliance on items to help players bring themselves back into contention, while the start of a round has collisions disable so you won’t have lost it all within the first few seconds. Oh, and there’s skill based matchmaking to ensure that you’ve always got comparable rivals – the bots are also skill-based for difficulty when they need to fill in.
Even if that core concept is seemingly so simple and obvious, there’s clearly been a good deal of effort going into Stampede: Racing Royale to make sure it’s a good, fun kart racer that lives up to all the refinement and polish that’s needed for the genre. At the same time, Sumo Leamington has taken on strange challenges like needing to design circuits for 60 racers at once – this means tracks are generally going to be much wider than you’d see in Mario Kart, but then there’s still potential for track obstacles to avoid, slightly more challenging shortcuts to take, and all of this wrapped up in a bunch of different map themes.
This final playtest is seeing Sumo push out another batch of fixes and improvements ahead of the game’s broader release into Early Access next month. That’s when Sumo will be rolling out things like seasons, challenges and start the trail of limited-time events, all the while continuing to build out the game ready for a full 1.0 launch across PC and other platforms next year.
