Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC – PS5 Review

Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC is a racing game by solo developer Josep Monzonis Hernandez and it’s been published by eastasiasoft and it offers up some straightforward motorsports action on a budget.

Our initial impressions of the game were a little bit weird.  There are very little options there on the main menu.  You can either start the game or go to an options screen.  However the options are super limited, really just covering the music and sound effects volume.  Indeed there are no mention of the controls at all.   Not before you start, not while you’re on the grid and not when you start driving.  And this is where it immediately gets weird.  Sure, you control your steering with the left stick/d-pad, accelerate with R2 and brake with L2, that’s as you’d expect.  But your car has slightly flabby cornering and so you’ll be looking for a handbrake button to drift those corners.

Well, there isn’t one.  Yep, this is as bareboned as it gets.  Steering and speed controls, that’s your lot.  Well, we think that’s the case.  There’s something weird about the TRIANGLE button though.  When you hold it, you can no longer steer but your wheels sort of leave the body of the car.  Like it’s as weird as that sounds.  It looks like a glitch and it has absolutely no utility in the game, it’s essentially a button that stops you steering.  And if it was meant to be a handbrake button we’d put it on any of the face buttons but that one.

There is one other button in the mix.  L1 changes your camera view cycling them between the main behind-and-above angle, a top down version (which is far less useful) and a side on view that you’ll immediately cycle right through because it’s no use at all.  We stuck to the main one and cracked on with the racing which we can only describe as adequate but old-school.  Essentially there’s not really any racing AI.  Your nine opponents all space themselves out equally and never attempt to race each other.  They don’t jostle for position, they don’t overtake, they show no type of personality.  It’s not really a field of racers but rather a procession that you overtake one car at a time.

There’s no damage either.  If your car hits another you sort of become locked until you slow down to detach from them.  You can’t really batter your way through a tough corner with a bit of contact either.  You can’t spin other cars out.  It’s just the most basic form of racing, like you’re playing Super Sprint but with slightly more modern visuals.

This lack of dynamism and ambition extends to the overall game too.  What you get are four racing leagues, ambitiously called Junior, Novice, Pro and Senior and each one contains eight races.  To get to the next race you need to finish in the top three of the previous one but there’s no points or Grand Prix format.  The other racers don’t have names or anything like that.  It’s 32 races with you starting in 10th position on each one.  No qualifying, no league format.  Nothing.  There’s not even a co-op mode.

And here’s where the developer’s claim of wanting to “make games that I want to play” starts to feel like a lie because one you get past the solid-but-basic gameplay there’s a real giveaway in the events themselves that show that minimal care and attention was given to this game.  Each race has a name ‘Thunder Valley’ or ‘Desert Blaze’ but these mean nothing.  There are three backdrops in the game, a forest, a snowy landscape and a tropical-ish one and the game doesn’t associate the right ones even when there’s a possible match,  Desert Blaze is set in the snow.  It’s a small thing but it really highlights a lack of care, attention and design.

Between that and the lack of gameplay modes, this makes Super Engine GT feel like a minimal viable product.  A racing game that hits the basics just enough to justify a release.  The only hope was that the third option on the main menu, Garage, would add some interest but it doesn’t.  There’s no buying cars, upgrading or decorating here, it’s just a place to select your car, with the only difference between them being their look.  There are no stats at all and everything is unlocked.

As such, we were about to get through all 32 tracks in the time it took to finish a podcast that we were listening to once the repetitive electronic music got too much.  That’s enough to get you the Platinum if you’re interested.  Even the four leagues thing didn’t make a difference as we couldn’t detect any difference in skill requirements at all on them and managed to get top three on every track at the first time of asking.  Usually first unless we got jammed up and couldn’t catch the frontrunner.

The only positive we can think of is that the visuals are okay.  The blurb says that the graphics are cel-shaded but we’re not too sure about that.  It’s all just fairly simplistic polygonal visuals but there’s a good amount of nice, saturated colour in there (you can tell we’ve been mainlining episodes of Ink Master, can’t you?) and the overall cutesy look is alright.  Yeah, faint praise but praise nonetheless.

The main issue here is the lack of ambition.  This type of game has existed for decades now and you don’t need to be a big budget Forza or Gran Turismo to be good.  From the original Trackmania to class party games like Circuit Breakers and Micro Machines, this is a genre that usually injects in a bit of innovation or excitement where it can.  But Super Engine GT doesn’t bother with any of that and that’s a problem for us.