I’ve seen a deluge of retro-inspired indie racers coming out on PC and console over the past year or so. By that, I mean they were clearly inspired by titles from the 16 and 32-bit era of gaming, such as Sega Rally and Top Gear. I wonder why this has becoming borderline trendy amongst indie devs, but I’ll take a Rally Arcade Classics, Victory Heat Rally or Parking Garage Rally Circuit over yet another roguelike deckbuilder any day of the week. With that being said, those games still featured a modicum of a budget, and were priced accordingly. It is time to take a look at the ultra low-budgeted sibling of the bunch, Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC. Neat name, by the way.

You can drift, but it’s not something you need to master in order to win races.

I’ll keep this brief as there is just not a lot to be said about Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC. It’s a very simplistic arcade racer played from a bird’s-eye-view perspective. In each race, the objective is to simply reach the first place after starting from the last place on the grid. If you get to third or higher, you unlock a new race, against the same group of racers. Despite the awesome game name, all cars here just look like basic hatchbacks with a somewhat Micro Machines-esque aesthetic. They all have the same stats, so you are choosing your car basically on its skin, not if it’s actually better than other vehicles.

All races feature the same three environments, meaning that tracks are just usually redesigns of the same ultra-simplistic aesthetic. Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC gets some points by running quite well, but the visual variety is minuscule. It’s a graphically tiresome game. Meanwhile, the races themselves are decent in terms of controls (they are responsive and fluid), but the game is basically devoid of physics. Hitting the wall or other cars doesn’t make you lose that much speed, and drifting is unnecessary, as the simple act of a slight touch on the brake pedal is already enough to make you not crash onto a nearby wall. The enemy AI is underwhelming at best.

Don’t bother trying to tail behind another car. You don’t get any kind of draft-related boosts.

One thing I actually really enjoyed was the soundtrack, which was clearly inspired by Barry Leitch’s work on the Top Gear franchise. And by that, I mean the Top Gear games from the 90s, not the BBC show. With that being said, I was disappointed with how minuscule the complete soundtrack was – the tune variety is really small, and each track, as cool as it sounds, is basically comprised of loops that don’t even last for more than 30 or 40 seconds. You can actually hear the songs restarting during each race. Nay, during each lap, basically.

Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC is a visually repetitive game.

This is a pretty small and underwhelming indie racer. I guess I should say it’s a competent game devoid of glitches and issues, but I was also not having a lot of fun playing it. I played Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC for about an hour and half, whilst thinking I could have stopped after just 45 minutes, considering how repetitive and devoid of content it is. You can have some enjoyment grabbing some achievements for your platform of choice for a really small entry fee, but Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC ain’t something I’ll either recommend or even remember over the next few days.

Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB and Asus ROG Ally.

A copy of Super Engine GT Turbo SPEC was provided by the publisher.