Screamer might have too many new ideas, even for a racing game

Veteran racing studio Milestone is trying to reinvent itself. Is it trying too hard?

Milestone does yeoman’s work, and in this case, that work is mostly licensed racing games, particularly motorbike games. It’s been the sole custodian of the MotoGP licence since 2013, and the MXGP motocross games for almost as long. It has its own motorbike series, Ride, a kind of two-wheeled Forza. It had the World Rally Championship series licence for a while. It makes monster truck games. Once, in 2007, it made a game about racing pick-up trucks.

But when Milestone acquired the Hot Wheels license for 2021’s Hot Wheels Unleashed, it unlocked something else buried deep in the developer’s history. Milestone, under the name Graffiti, began life as a developer of more arcade-inflected racing games — including the Ridge Racer-inspired 1995 cult hit, Screamer.

Hot Wheels Unleashed did well and reconnected the studio with its arcade racing heritage. The Milestone team decided the time was right to bring back Screamer; they sensed a space was opening up for something new in mainstream, non-simulation racing games. Talking to me in a PR company’s offices in London, Milestone’s development and creative director Michele Caletti noted signs of health in mainstream racing games, including the Forza Horizon series going multiplatform and the increased quality of Mario Kart’s competitors. But he bemoaned watching YouTube comparison videos of video game recreations of the Nürburgring, and not being able to tell one game from the next. “We think that what is missing is something really, really new,” he said.

Milestone’s answer is a new, very different Screamer. It’s an anime-inspired, narrative-led, arcade combat racer with a wild mishmash of unexpected elements, including twin-stick drifting controls, gear-shifting inspired by Gears of War’s active reload, and a complex twin-meter Echo system for building up energy for boosts, shields, and attack moves. There’s a story mode inspired by Japanese RPGs and fighting games, with surprisingly slick animated cut-scenes and a bustling cast of characters.

It’s a lot to take in. Milestone’s liberation from the world of licences was hard won: Caletti said that wresting back the rights to Screamer from its various publishers, including the now defunct Virgin Interactive, was “a very complex story.” But you can’t accuse the studio of not seizing its newfound freedom with both hands. “You are free from many of the boundaries, I don't want to say limitations, but boundaries,” Caletti said of representing reality in a way that’s faithful but approachable, and satisfying the needs of licensors. “But for Screamer, we have no limitations, no IP, no licenses, no real cars, no nothing. So you can do whatever you want.”

They certainly have done that, maybe to a fault. Screamer’s story mode, which I got to try for 40 minutes or so, introduces the various mechanics slowly and individually, alongside the relatively charming characters. But jump straight into a quick race and you’ll find your fingers all twisted up trying to cope with twin-stick steering, gear shifts (which build boost quicker), boosts, shields, and attacks.

Twin-stick drifting — in which drifting is controlled independently from steering, on the right stick — has been done before, and brilliantly, in 2020’s Inertial Drift. But that game is also sadly obscure for a reason: players didn’t get it. And Inertial Drift wasn’t layering on several other arcade mechanics as well.

Caletti insists that it’s intuitive. “The idea was, all the games that do drift start the drift with braking. So you use braking to slow down, but also to drift. And there’s an open question: how do you stop drifting?” he said. “You want it to feel like second nature. You want to feel in complete control, but some of the controls to start and eventually stop drifting are overlapping with other functions. So decoupling drifting and all the other controls allowed us to start to create something that is really natural and working in its own way.” I’m not so sure it does feel like second nature; it’s not like cars have two steering wheels, after all.

Storytelling within racing games has been tried a lot more often than twin-stick drifting, but has similarly struggled to gain traction. Caletti reckons this is down to a lack of imagination and the wrong choice of story model, and here he might be on to something. “Usually racing games with story revolve around legal races where you are a young driver that has to climb the ranks in different categories,” he said. “Or there are illegal races, street races where you're the underdog with some internal wound. This is very limiting. We wanted to get away from this, and the key point is creating characters that are not drivers first. They are drivers as a consequence, but these guys are something else from the very beginning. And so if you start in this way, the emotional palette, the motives, the ideas, the roles are different.”

From my brief glimpse, Screamer’s story mode reminded me of the likes of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, with characters arranged in teams, but with a complex web of interpersonal links beyond those teams. It’s also redolent of Tekken, with a diverse international cast each bringing their own motivation and baggage to a sporting tournament. In Screamer’s world, universal translators are a given, so the voice actors speak in a babble of global languages — English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Hindi, and more — while the player follows subtitles.

This choice lends a freshness and charm to the sometimes gauche dialogue. (At one point, somebody says “You just entered a certain chocolate factory and shit’s about to get wonky.”) “It is to convey something very specific, that is, the cultural melting pot that is happening in this near future,” Caletti said. “It was hard to sell, but it gets praise, because it’s very natural.” He also points out that it vastly simplifies the casting process for voice actors when it comes to localization, because you can concentrate on picking the single best actor for each role. (I loved the perpetually furious Irish mercenary, Róisín.)

Is there really an appetite for story in racing games? It’s unproven, but at least Milestone’s approach for Screamer is both fresh and carefully considered. Will gamers be able to get their heads around its dense mechanics and controls? We’ll find out when it’s released on March 26. Does the racing game genre need more risk-taking original games like this — and more studios willing to break character after decades in the licence mines? Absolutely.