Table Top Racing: World Tour Rolls Onto PC
Desktops on desktops
If racing games are about simulating real life experiences behind the wheel, then it must be said that few have captured reality in the same way Codemasters' Micro Machines did. It may not have been the greatest of games when it released back in 1991, but it did recreate a pre-school past time with aplomb (in my young mind, at least): driving miniature plastic cars around hand-crafted makeshift tabletop courses. Take a dash of that and add the frantic projectile-tossing of Mario Kart and you've got something that resembles Table Top Racing: World Tour [official site]. It's out now.
"High octane miniaturised combat racer" appears to the be the modern descriptor for such a game nowadays, and this one - the follow-up to a mobile game - comes courtesy of Wipeout co-creator Nick Burcombe and Playrise Digital. In both Championships and Special Events, single players can tour 12 customisable cars around five tabletop locations and 20 race tracks. What's more, if you've ever thought about racing miniature cars around the conveyor belts of a Yo! Sushi restaurant but were too scared you'd get a telling off (haven't we all?) you can do that too. Look:
Table Top Racing: World Tour's online multiplayer lets eight players duke it out in competitive races filled with a host of powerups and "super-powerful wheel weapons." Slightly disappointing, however, is the fact that the once-proposed split screen option hasn't yet made it into the final game - something Playrise say they hope to introduce at a later date:
"We did indeed lay out our ambitions in 2014 and we still stand by that ambition. However, as a small team of just 8 developers and just 2 programmers, we've had to prioritise 8 Player network play over the internet first. We DO want to bring Splitscreen eventually, but to do so we need your backing.
"The complexities of splitscreen mean that it's an expensive feature to put in - we always wanted to do it, in but as time marched on we had to make tough choices and rather than remake a cut down version of all the tracks - we focussed our limited resources on Network play."
If any of that revs your engine, Table Top Racing: World Tour is out now on Steam for £12.74/16,99€/$16.99 including a 15% launch discount.