Bump & Run Racing – Review

As always team Xbox Oldies likes to represent racers from all positions on the grid, we love the F1 franchise, Forza Motorsport 2023 is on pole position and classics like Burnout will always have a place on the podium, but towards the back of the grid, we see a lot of small indie titles who admittedly can’t keep pace with the AAA developers, but they each have their quirks, so it’s time to look at Bump and Run Racing on the Xbox, created by the one-man team of Swerve Studios, it was released a little while ago, but we’ve finally had chance to take it for a test drive.

Some racing games offer realism, others pure arcade action and some, just like to wreck as many cars as possible, Bump & Run sits somewhere between the latter two, with an arcade experience that feels similar to some old arcade classics like Daytona USA, with the smashing fun found in the early Burnout games and spiritual successions such as Danger Zone, Dangerous Driving and the forthcoming Wreckreation (all by former Burnout Devs, Three Fields Entertainment).
Starting from the main menu, you’ll want to head into the options, where you can select between low, medium (Xbox One) , high, very high (Series S) and Ultra (Series X), as well as PC or Consoles for quality – which also include the recommend setting for the aforementioned consoles to make sure you’re getting the best performance.

Back to the main menu and you have the choice between Career, Single Race and Crash Party.
Career takes you through 20 chapters each with a single event, sometimes you’ll have to win a circuit or sprint race, others survive an eliminator with last place dropping out after each lap, or maybe Hot pursuit where you’ll need to keep above a minimum speed for as long as possible while police cars chase you down, the fifth mode “Road Rage” is exactly what Burnout fans will expect, with a set number of eliminations required in the given timeframe.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, we’ve seen these races in dozens of other games, but there’s a decent variety, sadly to truly experience the variety you’ll have to play Single race’s as there’s no options in career mode, there’s not even a progression system you just do race 1, then when complete, you’re onto race 2, there’s not even a transition between events, you’re just thrown back to the main menu, with the next chapter your only option when returning to career mode.

Down on the starting grid, you’ll find a handful of “street” courses, ranging from more open main roads to smaller city stretches, there’s 4 tracks in total, Mountain, Highway, Rocky Coast and Downtown, and while you do get day and night races, 4 tracks is incredibly disappointing, Sega Rally managed 4 tracks, so almost 3 decades later, I expect a little more, even from the smallest titles.
Another flat tyre is that each track feels a little too familiar, unlike the European and American Taxi’s in the original Burnout (2001) there’s nothing to differentiate between locations, so aside from the actual layout and a few more recognizable features, they all look and feel far too familiar.

Once the awkward starting clock has counted up to 3, you’re off and sadly things continue downhill.
Firstly there’s no gradient when turning, tap it, push your stick all the way, it doesn’t matter, a turn is a turn and the car will turn at the same angle regardless of how much you push the stick, this makes general car control a battle that will take a few races to get used to, and will no doubt leed to more than a few crashes.

Crashes are at least fairly well done, you get the expected external camera showing a crash or takedown, but you’re quickly back on the track without losing too much time. making use of the generous boost bar (which can also be refilled with takedowns), I found a crash followed by a few seconds of boost would usually regain any lost positions.
Unfortunately, crashes aren’t always your own fault, due to the unpredictable nature of the AI system, one minute you can be driving full speed, smash into another car and you’ll bounce off like you’ve just clipped the edge of a curb, while other times you might graze a car doing 60 and you’re suddenly thrown up into the air like a 4-year-old having a tantrum at their Hot Wheels cars. This means you’ll generally try to avoid hitting other cars when possible as a few too many takedown attempts ended with me crashing out to be a reliable tactic.

As you progress through the career mode, you will unlock a total of 14 cars, some based on popular modern-day street cars such as the Ford Focus, Mitsubishi Eclipse and Honda Civic with a handful of others, which fill a few other stereotypes, such as stock car, muscle car and exotic car. None of the cars feel massively different to use in speed, and because of the clunky damage detection with other vehicles and twitchy steering, you can pretty much disregard the handling and weight stats.

You do get a few customization options which usually consist on 2 or 3 spoilers, the single colour “paint” for your car and a handful of neon lighting colours to choose from.
Games don’t need a vast array of customisation options to stand out, but what is available feels a little half-baked, Thankfully it does add a little pizazz to an otherwise disappointing graphical performance.

For overall presentation, let’s start off with the positives, there’s a strong retro feel (for better or worse), we get a decent feeling of speed, mostly thanks to the over-the-top blur when boosting, and while the music tracks aren’t the best quality, they fit the theme of the game well and there’s a pretty wide selection of tracks (far more than any other sort of tracks), the options does allow you to adjust the sound FX and Music volumes, but I didn’t have any major issues, while sound effects are a little tinny and repetitive, you still want to hear them, but neither are going to be sorely missed if you decide to play with the volume a little lower.

Onto the graphical performance and as you’ll see from the screenshots, things don’t look too great, I’ve sadly seen games on the original Xbox look better, and while I appreciate it’s a single developer, the overall appearance is below par.

The background look and feel is more like Daytona USA at times, AI cars look like (or worse than) the original Burnout, and main vehicles, look a little to shiny and glossy, it just doesn’t fit together well, add to this some very noticeable pop-in at distance, invisible walls causing unnecessary collisions, and car damage that’s considerably worse than the 20-year-old Burnout 1 & 2, and a few too many noticeable frame-rate drops, it’s all very disappointing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love indie games, I’ve worked very, very closely with single-man developers in the past and I know how difficult it is for them to juggle so many different areas of game development, but for their future games, I think Swerve Studios need to head straight to the graphics department and get a few upgrades.

The last area to address is value, and that’s where Bump & Run race’s off into the sunset, at the time of review, it’s on offer for only £1.09…. ONE POUND!!!. Even at its full price of just £2.49, that’s unbelievable value.
Sure, it’s a little clunky in places, the game feels like it’s stuck in first gear at times and it’s graphically disappointing, but I’ve played far, far worse games that are charging £10, £15 even £20, and at £2.49 so many shortcomings are forgiven for being such a reasonable price.

Bump & Run Racing is a low cost, low-budget and low-quality racing game, but for less than a Starbucks coffee, you can still get a fun few hours of racing, which means it’s still well worth checking out.

About Author