It’s kinda sad how good Screamer is. A lot of effort has been put into tuning the mechanics and presenting a lot of content for a traditional PC/console racer, but it feels like almost nobody will play this. A rare smaller scale game that delivers on a novel mechanical remix.
You want to be in boost or generating boost always. To be in 4th gear or less = death. Sharper turns will force you down there, even when drifting well, so the sharpest terms require that you have a boost on deck. Puzzle then is figuring out how many turns can be done without relying on celebration, and how to make sure that the boost is ready when you hit those points. The rest of the time you need to be going as fast as possible. Moving in and out of turning, boosts, and manoeuvring around other opponents means that you are really engaged every second of the race. There are very few long straights on tracks, and the AI tends to stay tight as a pack, so the game is very sink or swim. Even on time attack, or other solo modes, you start to get a feeling of how the track wants you to slow down.
If I have one big complaint it’s that the game doesn’t really explain each character’s mechanics very clearly, except when you go to the character select but even there the word salad of terms obscures the functions or strategy each passive effect implies. Since the character select is not accessible in story mode you are thrown into a bunch of different characters abilities with no explanation of why they are different or how which makes them feel a bit less special when they are introduced in turn. This is a bit of a weird oversight given that the game goes to great lengths to teach you other things like boosting out of a drift, or explaining gear shift boosts. Why not put the racer abilities front and centre, and this is some big meat going undiscussed!
Also, you better learn everybody’s first names and faces if you want to keep track of both the story and, sometimes, team races. Sadly, this is where the character design sometimes falls a bit short. We have a lot of scope for interesting characters but the five teams have very muted and uniform styles. Also, the gimmick of having characters from all over the world is not as strong with two of the teams being made up entirely of Japanese racers (one Yakuza, the other a J-pop trio). There’s an Italian racer who feels like a self-insert for the Italian studio who clearly love Japanese stuff to the extent they feel like they’re treating a lot of the other cultural touch points as inherently less interesting.