TheRetroArcade
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Posts: 2,005
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
An immaculately presented arcade racer with a thousand good ideas, but the twin-stick drifting wasn’t one of them.
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In a genre where so many games are determined to squabble over who can make the best LIDAR-scanned Monza, we need more Screamers. Milestone’s narrative-led, anime-infused arcade racer has a delightful plethora of fresh ideas, and it lavishes meticulous care into realising them. It’s distinct and idiosyncratic, in all the ways a game should be, all the ways we fear they won’t be when AI gets its tendrils further into the medium. In many ways it’s everything I’d want a racer to be in 2026. Just one problem: I don’t like the driving.
What is it? A futuristic racing tournament with slightly too much oil on its roads.Release date March 26, 2026Expect to pay $60/£50Developer MilestonePublisher MilestoneReviewed on i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAMSteam Deck Deck: VerifiedLink Official site
Every other way Screamer wants to do things differently, I can get on board with. I love that the extensive cast of racers competing in the Screamer tournament all speak in their own native languages, so within one scene I might hear Japanese, Italian, Flemish and an Irish lilt, and understand them all via subtitles. I love the interplay between the teams, and the members of those teams. It feels like a different way to approach narrative in racing games, which typically boils down to the same few soap opera plots.
Screamer seems determined not to revert to type here, filling your brain with sharply drawn character archetypes that draw from a bigger world of influences than simply ‘Need For Speed 2003-present’. Take the Green Reapers, for example, the first team that Tournament mode introduces you to. It begins simply enough: Róisín, Frederic and Hiroshi have some kind of beef with tournament organiser Mr A, so they enter with revenge on their minds.
As the races progress, you see the tensions within the trio, familial power struggle stuff. Then the points of origin for those tensions, and then why those tensions lead each character to react in the way they do when unforeseen events transpire. It’s more narrative rigour than I was expecting in a game about making cars go fast, honestly. It’s not shoehorned in, either. The exposition feels as much a part of the game as the racing does, because there’s a cohesion to all the component parts here. The glue is the anime presentation, complete with a Persona-style intro cutscene which shows your retinas more colours than you previously thought existed.
The developers at Milestone are self-confessed anime geeks and fighting game aficionados, and somehow pulling those inspirations out of situ and into this game makes everything flow naturally, from a dialogue exchange between 2D character avatars, into a bombastic race in a dystopian future, and then swapping out spoilers in a vehicle customisation menu.
I need to talk about the handling model and controls, though. Screamer wants to nod to its 1995 spiritual predecessor, Milestone’s first release, by capturing the same exaggerated drifts that characterised that DOS era racer. It does this by mapping steering to the left analog stick, and drifting to the right stick. That twin-stick driving is very disorienting, and transitioning from a full drift angle to facing straight ahead is awkward, because you don’t feel the weight transfer. An irk that’s made even trickier by the camera’s exaggerated lateral movement when you initiate a drift.
It feels like patting your head while performing keyhole surgery. I admire the game for taking such a bold approach to handling and discerning itself from everything else out there, including NFS: Unbound’s tap-to-drift style and JDM: Japanese Drift Master’s forensic physics-based approach. But even after the...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
PC Gamer's got your back
Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware.
In a genre where so many games are determined to squabble over who can make the best LIDAR-scanned Monza, we need more Screamers. Milestone’s narrative-led, anime-infused arcade racer has a delightful plethora of fresh ideas, and it lavishes meticulous care into realising them. It’s distinct and idiosyncratic, in all the ways a game should be, all the ways we fear they won’t be when AI gets its tendrils further into the medium. In many ways it’s everything I’d want a racer to be in 2026. Just one problem: I don’t like the driving.
What is it? A futuristic racing tournament with slightly too much oil on its roads.Release date March 26, 2026Expect to pay $60/£50Developer MilestonePublisher MilestoneReviewed on i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAMSteam Deck Deck: VerifiedLink Official site
Every other way Screamer wants to do things differently, I can get on board with. I love that the extensive cast of racers competing in the Screamer tournament all speak in their own native languages, so within one scene I might hear Japanese, Italian, Flemish and an Irish lilt, and understand them all via subtitles. I love the interplay between the teams, and the members of those teams. It feels like a different way to approach narrative in racing games, which typically boils down to the same few soap opera plots.
Screamer seems determined not to revert to type here, filling your brain with sharply drawn character archetypes that draw from a bigger world of influences than simply ‘Need For Speed 2003-present’. Take the Green Reapers, for example, the first team that Tournament mode introduces you to. It begins simply enough: Róisín, Frederic and Hiroshi have some kind of beef with tournament organiser Mr A, so they enter with revenge on their minds.
As the races progress, you see the tensions within the trio, familial power struggle stuff. Then the points of origin for those tensions, and then why those tensions lead each character to react in the way they do when unforeseen events transpire. It’s more narrative rigour than I was expecting in a game about making cars go fast, honestly. It’s not shoehorned in, either. The exposition feels as much a part of the game as the racing does, because there’s a cohesion to all the component parts here. The glue is the anime presentation, complete with a Persona-style intro cutscene which shows your retinas more colours than you previously thought existed.
The developers at Milestone are self-confessed anime geeks and fighting game aficionados, and somehow pulling those inspirations out of situ and into this game makes everything flow naturally, from a dialogue exchange between 2D character avatars, into a bombastic race in a dystopian future, and then swapping out spoilers in a vehicle customisation menu.
I need to talk about the handling model and controls, though. Screamer wants to nod to its 1995 spiritual predecessor, Milestone’s first release, by capturing the same exaggerated drifts that characterised that DOS era racer. It does this by mapping steering to the left analog stick, and drifting to the right stick. That twin-stick driving is very disorienting, and transitioning from a full drift angle to facing straight ahead is awkward, because you don’t feel the weight transfer. An irk that’s made even trickier by the camera’s exaggerated lateral movement when you initiate a drift.
It feels like patting your head while performing keyhole surgery. I admire the game for taking such a bold approach to handling and discerning itself from everything else out there, including NFS: Unbound’s tap-to-drift style and JDM: Japanese Drift Master’s forensic physics-based approach. But even after the...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?