Hotshot Racing

Hotshot Racing is a racing game developed by Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital and published by Curve Digital. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on September 10, 2020.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The game is reminiscent of 90s arcade racing games such as Virtua Racing, Daytona USA, and SCUD Race (Sega Super GT in North America).
 * 2) 8 characters to choose from in which each of them has their own cars that are specialized in different stats.
 * 3) On top of that, each character has its own ending.
 * 4) Four locations in which each of all had 4 tracks (for a total of 16 tracks) to race on.
 * 5) *The Big Boss Bundle (which is a free DLC) adds 1 extra track for each location.
 * 6) Aside from the standard arcade racing mode, the game features two other modes:
 * 7) *Cops and Robbers where cops are trying to catch robbers before they reach the finish line.
 * 8) *Drive or Explode where players have to drive over a certain speed otherwise they lose health which make them explode should they reach 0. The speed also increases as they pass more checkpoint.
 * 9) *Barrel Barrage (part of the free DLC) which is just like arcade race but with a twist, you and your opponent gets one barrel for every time they pass a checkpoint in which they can use to obstruct the race and if should one drive into it, they will lose health. Each racer can carry up to 2 barrel.
 * 10) Awesome soundtrack composed by Jason Heine (known as TheHeineHouse on YouTube) as well as Waterflame (who composes video game-esque songs).

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The game suffers from rubberband AI most notably on the Expert setting in which regardless if you're driving the best car like Keiko's Super F90 or Marcus' Carbon (Bugatti Veyron Super Sport) the AI opponent will still be on top of you most of the time, all of this thanks to something at number 3.
 * 2) Changing the difficulty setting doesn't give higher money payout.
 * 3) As revealed by Gamer Alex, the game was a watered-down version of an unreleased vehicular combat game called Racing Apex, with scrapped features such as The Crew-style spec conversions (you can turn a car (take a GT spec car such as the Diamond-Back (Chrysler Viper GTS-R) for example) into a rally raid car or a drag car), a capture-the-flag mode, proper vehicle damage, and a "driver and gunner" mode, where it's a split-screen game, one drives the car, and one shoots another opponent. This is also the reason why the track design is a lackluster piece of asphalt, because the tracks are made when they develop Racing Apex, in which the developers had vehicular combat in mind. More issues came from this, such as floaty handling, aggressive AI, bad collision physics, and worse, AI Rubberbanding.