Racing Master has great visuals, but its progression systems are a traffic jam
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SHOULD I PLAY RACING MASTER?
Racing Master looks gorgeous, but you can safely skip this one unless you’re desperate for another collection of reward tracks and upgrade meters to fill up. There is technically a racing game in Racing Master, but it’s buried in the typical avalanche of mobile monetization mechanics. The balance between actual gameplay and progression-related busywork is way, way off here, to the point that I felt I was hardly doing much racing at all.
TIME PLAYED
I’ve played a couple hours of Racing Master and completed the first story chapter. That involved about eight ranked races, some skills challenges, pulling and upgrading half a dozen cars that ranged from a 2019 Ford Fiesta SE up to a 2020 Aston Martin DB11 V12, and drumming my fingers through a bunch of tutorial cutscenes that introduced me to the basics of racing as well as my support team of slightly annoying NPCs.
WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT RACING MASTER?
• Terrific graphics. Racing Master’s Unreal-powered visuals look great, even on my phone’s small screen. Car models are nicely detailed, with glossy paint that picks up the sunlight dancing through the girders on the Chicago “L” tracks overhead. Speaking of which, the maps look great, too—tearing through tulip fields outside Amsterdam and drifting around corners in Indianapolis was always visually spectacular.
• The turns. I’d argue that Racing Master is a game mostly about its turns: the focus was all on hitting the brakes at the right moment as I entered a curve, then gunning the engine to restore traction and zip out after I’d crossed the apex. Getting that right felt great every time, but a slight misjudgment would send me slamming into the guardrails.
• Customization options. Racing Master’s garage was packed with upgrade options for my cars, and provided I was ready to earn the required materials, I could improve engines, tires, framework, and more. I also had the option to add custom after-market body kits and add-ons like spoilers and underglow lighting. Each car had a wealth of options for fine-tuning and customization.
WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN RACING MASTER?
• More hamster wheels than racing wheels. Racing Master is saddled with so many little progression meters, materials, currencies, login bonuses and other free-to-play cruft that I found it difficult to find the actual racing at times. Everything I did resulted in a little gift icon appearing somewhere on the menu, prompting me to stop what I was doing and hunt through a bunch of submenus to find where I was supposed to claim my bonus. The game was packed with this stuff, and it was a major damper on my experience.
• Custom tuning is pretty basic. While there were tons of unlocks for custom body kits and paint jobs for each car, I found the actual upgrade system for important stats to be disappointingly basic. There were five components I could upgrade on each car, they were all the same, and they all used various currencies I’d have to earn by completing objectives and winning races. In other words, by grinding for them.
• Ridiculously short races. Some of the early races in particular were only a few seconds long—just enough to make a turn or two before crossing the finish line. After sitting through all the silly story stuff and the long loading times, these short races were a bummer.
PLATFORM TESTED
Android via Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra
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