Milestone was once known as a developer solely focused on more serious racing simulators, but ever since the release of their excellent Hot Wheels games, they’ve earned a reputation for coming up with innovative gameplay elements for an otherwise very traditional genre. Screamer is their latest, uh, “non-traditional” racer, and it’s a very special occasion for them. The Screamer franchise is actually more than three decades, having been originally released on DOS back in 1995. This is essentially a reboot of an older arcade racer series, but completely reworked as a cyberpunk racer. Oh, and with anime aesthetics.

A twin-stick system for drifting was certainly a choice. Not the ideal choice, but something innovative, I suppose.

What Milestone has decided to do was create a brand new arcade racer with a very lengthy story mode, one which acts, in part, like a visual novel. You get to meet a band of ragtag characters, who create their own racing team, the Green Reapers, joining in a competition in order to assassinate another competitor, accused of having been the one responsible for the murder of their mentor. You also get to meet other teams, whose members have different reasons for joining this brand new competition. All of them are voiced in their native language, which is awesome to see – everyone has implants that allows them to understand all languages in the world, making the world of Screamer feel alive and detailed.

Sure, in terms of lorebuilding, Screamer does something I haven’t seen since the Game Boy Advance F-Zero games. A fully realized world where people drive heavily modified supercars, complete with insane boosters, drifting mechanics, and even a little macguffin that allows them to survive crashes and respawn without suffering any damage. All in all, a great premise. But what about actually playing the damn thing? Well, we then reach a major roadblock.

I love her stupidly heavy Irish accent. And perpetually bad mood.

The issue with Screamer lies in its innovative control scheme. Think quickly: how do you drift in 99% of racing games out there? You either just move the control stick around like a fool, when the game is fully arcadey, or do a combination of steering and pressing the handbrake button. In Screamer, Milestone has decided to test out a brand new control scheme where you steer with the left analog stick, but you actually drift with the right analog stick. It’s… certainly a choice.

I can see the logic, but it just doesn’t work very well, in my opinion. The problem lies in not being fully able to perform drifts ideally: you never know the right amount of input you need to put on the right analog stick to do a correct drift, and the game doesn’t do a good job at teaching you the proper physics. You then feel disoriented as hell, as if you were running on ice. Furthermore, getting out of the drift and into a straight feels awkward, as the dual-stick system simply doesn’t let your brain align your car’s weight distribution properly. To top things off, Screamer is a hard game. It’s the kind of racing game that doesn’t forgive your mistakes: one crash can lead you to losing a race altogether.

Visually speaking, there’s nothing else like Screamer.

Knowing when to boost, when to drift, when to defend and when to attack is crucial in order not to lose a race. Screamer also features some combat elements, so you need to think about these things whilst drifting like a drunkard on Russia in January. It results in an admittedly deep and innovative racing game, one I haven’t seen in a while, but while the ideas sound excellent on paper, balancing all of these elements during a fast-paced race with poor controls is a hassle. Can you get used to it and learn how Screamer works? Of course you can. It’s all a matter of perspective and persistence. But since this is so different from anything else out there, it almost feels like you have to unlearn how to drive a car in order to drive a Screamer ride.

I know this is a blatant nod to the corgi from Cowboy Bebop, but just LOOK AT HIM. Ain’t he precious?

There’s truly no other racing game like Screamer, and I commend how innovative it is. Furthermore, it’s got great visuals, excellent voice acting, and it miraculously manages to blend in a heavy visual novel narration into its story mode, without ruining its pacing. It’s just quite complicated to control, however, requiring you to basically forget everything you’ve ever learned about driving cars in a videogame in order to get used to its bizarre mechanics. You can get used to it, and if you do, you will be rewarded for your patience. But it’s simply not the most accessible, and as a result, enjoyable racing game out there. But in a world where racing games are too similar to one another, even if Screamer is flawed, I really respect the fact it exists as is.

Screamer is available now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on PS5.

A copy of Screamer was provided by the publisher.