DeathSprint 66 is… well, it’s like if Sonic had a baby with Wipeout and a buzzsaw. Coming out on 12th September, it’s a futuristic racing game that keeps you on two feet, sprinkles every circuit with deadly lasers, spikes and other traps, and throws in a few power ups for good measure. It’s pretty great.
In the finest traditions of 1980s sci-fi films, DeathSprint’s vision for the year 2066 is one where megalithic media corporations hold sway over our lives, keeping the addled masses entertained with the most brutal and visceral of entertainment. The Bachman Media Network has cooked up the DeathSprint, buying up desolate cities after ecological disasters saw them abandoned, and turning them into race tracks for (cloned) human competitors to race and die in. Move over, sex, it’s actually broadcasting human clones getting turned into bloody pulp that sells.
The eight-person races are fast and furious, and for all the dystopian sci-fi trappings, the controls and handling will be pretty much immediately familiar to fans of cutesy kart racers. You can boost off the line by timing your button press right, there’s boost pads and jump pads to weave your way onto, rails to grind or zipline along, drift-sliding around corners that build up to a boost, and a smattering of item pickups that you can fling at rival competitors or defend yourself with – there’s the usual assortment of homing and untargeted weapons, shields, and builds up to the Giga Saw.
But what sticks out, quite literally, are the deadly traps that you’re trying to evade. Each track is a maze of death with shifting laser barriers, many-teethed grinders, buzzsaws and more that are just waiting for you to misjudge a jump, a racing line, and apex, or get slapped in the back of a head by a competitor boosting past you, and clatter into them. Death feels almost inevitable. Thankfully it’s also temporary for the competitors, with the actual runner kept safe and out of harm’s way, while the remote race clones run through the arenas. You can die and respawn as many times as you like, but after the third, all your cosmetics are stripped away and you are shamed by having a test dummy get-up applied instead.
Winning isn’t everything though, and chaining together different traversal types helps to build up Hype from the viewing audience. Do a good job and you’ll earn more rewards that feed into your Fame rank, earning more interest from sponsors and unlocking cosmetics for your runner.
While Sumo Digital naturally hope that online multiplayer will become the core of the game, there’s also solo modes that go beyond the standard time trials. These single-player ‘episodes’ remix the game, and while branding them as episodes sounds like they’re strings of races, they’re actually a bunch of different variants that ramp up the challenge in a variety of ways and that you can dip in and out of as you choose.
We tried out Killing Time, where you have a minuscule 15 seconds timer that you have to extend by hitting checkpoints, with the hope of reaching the finish line. Five Lives is… well, it gives you five lives to finish the race before it’s game over. Surge Master has you trying to follow chains of lightning symbol pick-ups to build up a high score, while Bloodbath then just doubles the number of traps to make for a cruelly tricky track.
I do love a good dystopian future sports game, and DeathSprint 66 is a fun riff on the tropes of this particular sci-fi genre. Sumo Digital has stuck with the tried and true gameplay of a kart racer, but it’s doing a great job of blending that with a distinctive and deadly flair.
