NeoSprint | PS5 Review

Back in the 1980s, Atari was split into two companies: Atari and Tengen. Tengen worked to circumvent Nintendo’s license agreement and override Nintendo’s proprietary chip. They succeeded, launched a bunch of games, and were sued by Nintendo. You can read about it in this article on Wikipedia here. One of those games was Super Sprint. It came in a nifty, black, non-Nintendo looking cartridge. It was a simple, top-down racing game. Four cars in a race, power ups would appear on the track, and upgrades were available after the race for endless arcade style fun.

NeoSprint is the entertaining successor to that subversive classic NES game. The game boots up with that beautiful Atari logo welcoming an old friend into their home to catch up and reminisce about the old times. But this isn’t just a recreation for our more modern consoles. The simple graphic style remains, the gameplay options are slightly different, and there is a lot more to it than just a racing mode. Let’s dive in and see what fun can be had!

Racing

In the simplest terms, NeoSprint is an arcade style racing game. If you’re looking for a Forza Horizon/Need For Speed style story, look elsewhere. That’s not to say that there isn’t a campaign mode here. Unlike the NES original, NeoSprint offers a competitive campaign. There are three Championship Cups in progressive difficulty. Each cup has four rounds, each round has three races and a boss race at the end should you be successful in earning the most points in the first three races. Quick math gives us 48 races in the campaign mode. Each race takes a minute or two to complete. NeoSprint offers a retry mode should the race end unfortunately; more on that in a later section.

Winning each round unlocks new paint schemes and colors for your car. You have eight cars to choose from each with different Max Speed, Acceleration, and Turning abilities similar to the kart choices in the more recent Mario Kart games. I didn’t dive too deeply into each vehicle, but found myself enjoying the car with the best turning and acceleration combo. I was most successful with that car, too, since straight driving is not very common at all. 

Winning also unlocks new options for the “Design Your Own Track” mode. It is exactly what it sounds like. Design your track and race on it! Free Race mode lets you select one racetrack to enjoy while Championship mode allows you to select from the rounds above in a one-off championship instead of a route to campaign completion. 

Something missing from NeoSprint in comparison to the original is power ups. You do not make improvements to the car like better turning or faster speed as the rounds progress. What you drive in the first Cup is the exact same car you’ll drive in the final round. Of course, you are welcome to change cars. You just cannot make them better. There also aren’t power ups on the track like speed boosts, although you are able to draft and get a boost. A lot of the turns are very tight hairpins so the drafting boosts didn’t come in very handy for me.

The Obstacle Course mode was a lot of fun, too! There are 48 more race tracks where you race, time trial style, against the clock. Hit an obstacle and you get an unforgiving time penalty which almost certainly knocks you out of medal contention. Beat the prescribed time and get a gold medal. Silver and Bronze are available if you do well enough but are unable to beat the goal. Earn medals on every track in that round and you’re given even more unlockables for paint schemes and design-your-track mode.

I Remember These Imprecise Controls

If you’re looking for an honest racing game that responds to your control inputs, look elsewhere. This is arcade chaos through and through. You have three buttons to utilize: Accelerate, Brake (and reverse), and Hand-Brake. The hand-brake is sporadic, at best. It took me until the third Cup in campaign mode to solidly figure out when I needed it vs normal braking vs just letting off the accelerator. Even the car with the best turning ability was no match for the hairpins. 

About those hairpin turns. In the first Cup, the opponent racers are terrible. I didn’t even come in 2nd Place until midway through the Second Cup. It was at this point that I noticed that the computer controlled racers were not being held to the same physics limitations that I was. If it was the final two laps, the computer controlled cars didn’t have to slow down nearly as much as I did to make it through those hairpin turns. Have you ever played NFL Blitz on the N64 or Playstation? Remember how you could be winning by four touchdowns entering the 4th quarter only to wind up losing the game? Yeah, that happens with NeoSprint, too. Not nearly as frequently, but enough to frustrate from time to time. The computer controlled cars also became increasingly aggressive by plowing into turns and/or wrecking you on purpose. And if you believe that those CPU cars would take as long to recover from that crash, you’re kidding yourself. It wouldn’t be an arcade style game without arbitrary rules and luck, I suppose.

I’m beating the game up a bit in this section and it’s deserved. In the end, I still only had to retry a total of five races as a result of those shenanigans through the entire campaign. I became accustomed to the controls, more accepting/prepared for the computer cars, and still loved the game! The boss battles weren’t that challenging since there was only one opponent instead of 3-5 other cars trying to wreck you.

Simple but Effective

The graphics received the required upgrade to be placed on our modern consoles. I played NeoSprint on my PS5, but it could likely run just as smoothly and in the same form on a Sega CD. The colors pop off the screen, and the locations vary from desert to winter to night time and more. 

Something that I really liked was the option to go with the classic “entire track” view or “focus on the car” view. The focus on the car view allowed for easier control and, honestly, it looked better. Despite that, I chose to keep the view on entire-track view. This was initially for the nostalgia bump but as the game progressed, it became more for knowing which turns were coming and where the other cars were on the track. The races are too short to memorize each track. I wanted to be prepared instead of enjoying the graphical enhancements of a zoom-in. 

The music is repetitive arcade fun! After the 4th race win and 2nd championship round, I started skipping the intro and outro scenes. They didn’t change. The game developers didn’t spend a lot of time here so neither will I. Positive points for fun, but there was a lack of depth.

Replay Again and Again

I played Super Sprint frequently on my old NES. Especially as I started getting older and I had to fit in gaming between school, homework, and getting to Blockbuster Video for my 5pm-close shift. Those quick hits were fun and I didn’t feel frustrated when it was time to put down the controller. Same here. Pick it up, play it for a few minutes to an hour or so! Bonus points to the current gen consoles that let me walk away, the console goes to sleep, I return the following day, and I’m right back where I left off! 

And the biggest positive is the replayability. I love the free race options because some tracks are definitely more fun than others. The “Design Your Own Track” mode lets me design tracks based on certain cars’ strengths. I want to use the car with the highest top speed? Then I’ll design a track with more straightaways. The Obstacle Course was a great distraction from arcade racing. And the number of tracks available (after unlocking them all) provide variety that kept me coming back for more. At a presumed $24.99, it would appear that Atari is counting on players like me that either like the quick Arcade-Style racing hit OR have very very fond memories of that cool game from 1989. 

NeoSprint gets my absolute stamp of approval. If anything above sounds agreeable to you, I believe that you’ll have just as much fun as I did.

To hear me talk more about NeoSprint, be sure to listen to the July 3, 2024 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast.

This review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy of NeoSprint  provided by Uber Strategist for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Atari VCS, and PC via Steam and on GOG and Epic Games Store at a later date.