Super Woden GP II – PS5 Review

From Spanish solo developer ViJuDa and publisher Eastasiasoft comes Super Woden GP II, the follow-up to 2022’s Super Woden GP  that our man Richie reviewed. If you played that, this is more of the same and that’s no bad thing if we’re honest. Quite why it’s Super Woden, we’re not really sure. We guess it could be something to do with Norse mythology, so perhaps less daft sounding than Super Wednesday GP. Either way, it’s a bit ungainly.

Aping the early Gran Turismo games in terms of its front end, we half expected the menu music to be a homage to that from the very first game if we’re honest. It’s more upbeat and somehow less memorable. Heck, we’d not played the first Gran Turismo in years and that theme is still burned into our brain.

 Just as you would do in any of the extended Gran Turismo series games, the premise here is going to be familiar in that you start out with a crappy car and work your way up through the championships to progress through Super Woden GP II’s career.

Unlike Gran Turismo there’s a disclaimer at the start of the game, saying that all car likenesses are entirely coincidental. It’s all well and good, but the vehicles here are thinly veiled ciphers copying real-world cars. We guess all’s fair in love and homage, but who are we kidding? The Cinder Garstutt for example is clearly a mid-80s Porsche 911 Turbo. There’s even a handy webpage here that shows you what the real-world equivalents are. At any rate, all the cars from particular countries come under one manufacturer, Soop being the US, Cinder being Germany, Aalia being Italy etc.

The gameplay, however, is something of a departure from Gran Turismo, instead aping any number of isometric racing games such as The Art of Rally  or the rather less well known Super Pixel Racing that we reviewed a while ago. RC Pro Am on the NES could well be seen to be a progenitor of this in some regard, just with a narrower field of view The controls take a bit of getting used to, especially when you realise that just like in the first game, any mistakes will generally hand victory to the AI opponents. This isn’t so bad on short races, but on the longer events it can be a pain.

After you start to get the hang of the handling, you’ll find yourself winning races, be they in the weekend or career mode. There’s also rallies and endurance races to complete. You’ll begin your career only able to access a few races to start with, your progress being gated until you get stars. These unlock more events for you to access. You also get cash and prize cars to help you progress, the most handy of which are the seemingly underpowered rally cars that more than hold their own against vehicles you’d expect them to be outclassed by. They come into their own on twisty technical courses due to their superior acceleration.

In a similar manner to any number of racing games, you can modify most vehicles with some of your hard-earned cash to aid progress and give you a slight competitive edge against the AI drivers. Talking of the opposition, they don’t really do much in the way of defensive driving, generally sticking to a racing line with minimal deviation. They’re not much use for anything but slipstreaming to gain a bit of extra speed. We’ve managed to snag a win just on the line as a result, so their predictability and sticking to the line is useful at least.

The rally stages are time trials purely against the clock, just as in actual rally special stages. These have Sega Rally style pace notes which are really handy, though your success is still largely dependent on an error free run. Thankfully you can easily restart a stage and have another go. These rally stages also make up the arcade mode that feels like a bit of an afterthought.

In conclusion, Super Woden GP II is fun enough with a fair bit of depth if you get properly obsessed. The driving model is a little quirky but when you consider this is the work of a solo developer, it’s obviously quite the labour of love. We expect many assets were shunted over from the first game in the series, but we can hardly blame the dev for that. In typical Eastasiasoft fashion, there’s a PS4/PS5 trophy stack so you can double dip in fairly short order.