TrickStyle

This is a great title which I used to play a lot when I was younger, and picking it up today I'm glad to say it's still a lot of fun. Make no mistake, while the word 'trick' might be in the title, the main focus of the game is racing. You speed across various futuristic race tracks in the UK, USA and Japan, which are all connected by a hub level in which you may take on various challenges in order to learn new tricks. The tracks themselves are fun to navigate and offer some diverging paths and shortcuts you can take to get the drop on your competition. Visually the game still looks pretty damn good. The color pallet is rich, the environments are varied and interesting and the overall presentation stood the test of time fairly well. The animations especially look very fluid. The only real drawback is the game's length. Aside from the handful of challenges in the hub section there are only 15 tracks, including boss levels Each track takes around 2-3 minutes to complete. You must finish first to move on to the next level, but the competition isn't terribly stiff so most races can be beaten after two or three tries. If you're into oldschool racers you are in for a treat!

This is a very interesting game for its time period and something not really seen very often. You will compete with a diverse crew of racers in futuristic settings using hoverboards and doing tricks. Bad news is the game is not as good of a racing game and not as good as a stunt game either. The races feel too random for being a racing game and the tricks performed don't really matter while in race, meanwhile you have little chances of performing tricks because the majority of them are wonky and you will crashh most of the time. The game has a lot of repetition which is understandable but feels more like a geometry dash learn the level kind of thing. However the tracks are quite good and interesting. If the handling was better this would have been a 5 star game. As far as the port, it's great and ran with no issues.

Great turn of the century game that comes with a lot of positives in style, presentation, music. Overall it's a very enjoyable experience. I love these older games with extreme sports and a lot of secret or alternate routes on the track (similar to SSX Tricky for example). I wish more modern games did that. The downside is the controls are a bit clunky, and the stunts, while varied, don't have much of a purpose outside of dedicated stunt events, and even there some are clearly better than others and you need to stick to the good ones because timers are very tight in this game. There is quite a bit of rubber banding in AI which is good or bad depending what you prefer, but it makes mistakes in the first half of the races very forgiving. My opinion, this game was time well spent from start to finish.

I remember playing this on a demo disc for the Dreamcast years ago, but I never did buy it at the time. I'll definitely grab this when I have some free time. Hopefully I'll also be surprised and see another Dreamcast title (Also had a PC version) appear on GoG soon (Fur Fighters)