Wave Rider review

Follow the neon-brick road

The opening sequence puts the player in a house-shaped pentagon racer inside a gray grid with abstractly texturing amorphous shapes in the distance. A message welcomes the player by asking for your driver's license and informing you of safety while linking to the simulation. Then, controls appear on the screen directing you to the floating blue pillars of light in the distance. Upon closer inspection, the blue light pillars mark the middle of a tunnel outlined by encircling digital symbols. You have a choice of entering the destination point through either side of a tunnel upon which the game truly begins: immediately upon entry, an announcer informs you that a connection error has occurred and that you must disconnect immediately to avoid harm. Meanwhile, a different voice (animated by floating text in the middle of the screen) goads you to continue. Upon finishing a lap, the music kicks into high gear: the announcer warns you to avoid the checkpoints like the one you just crossed, and the game welcomes you to the race.

It is expected that the controls will behave as a racer would. If you're on an Xbox controller (like this reviewer is), the right trigger is the gas pedal, the right bumper is the brake, the left trigger activates drifting, the joystick controls which direction your racer drives towards, and the 'X' button is your turbo that gives your racer a speed boost for a limited amount of time determined by a rechargeable turbo meter on the bottom right. Also in the corner are your health bar and speedometer, the former of which is a core game mechanic. Usually, racing simulations have only your pride, speed, and digital points to tarnish when you don't quite make a turn. However, Wave Rider makes it clear that it wants you to do your best to find the perfect drift line through a corner, and it's willing to punish you for it: hit the sides too often, and you'll deplete your health bar. Once it hits zero, you explode and respawn back to your most recent checkpoint. Thankfully, you can exchange your turbo meter for health by pressing and holding the left bumper (but don't worry, the turbo meter refills over time when not in use). This added mechanic feels well-balanced. Its gentle nudge towards difficulty gives a more complex driving experience than Mario Kart while forgiving enough that I had no problem completing racetracks on my second or third try.

Vaporwave Mona Lisa

An interesting kink to this mechanic of losing health while hitting the sides of the racetrack is that it's sticky: you feel a pull that keeps you on the side (losing health) until you make a more conscious effort to veer off it by making a sharper turn or activating the turbo. The effect becomes much more pronounced if you're drifting, so much so that you can insta-death yourself by simply drifting into the side a second too long. It adds an appreciated difficulty so that you can't just bounce off walls with no consequences though it would be nice if the game could make this more explicit by calling it out in the game tutorial. Aside from that, the racetrack is divided into checkpoints that you have a limited amount of time to cross before it throws you back to your most recently crossed checkpoint. There's also an additional mechanic of pressing the 'Y' button to slow down time that the game's tutorial takes special care to show you, but it never quite explains why you should use it. As a result, I've never made much use of it in my playthroughs.

Wave Rider is lush with vaporwave iconography; neon colors, grid large structures that paint immense Cyberpunk-theme urban landscapes. The effect is that each course has a solid artistic identity that shares an ancestor with Tron. The scale of the creations, coupled with you and the roads' relatively diminutive size, provides each racetrack with deep awe every time. The game makes it easy to feel the zen of a racecar driver: everything feels timeless and utterly focused on you and the road. What elevates the experiences, though, are the flourishes done throughout the game. One racetrack pulsed its colors in time with its soundtrack and had me in a stupid grin the entire time. Another had a seamless transition from a beautiful coastal sunset into a rainbow-space cave that left me with a powerful sense of beauty and deep respect for the developer's artistic direction.In short, I've never felt more relaxed and at peace while playing a game: Wave Rider feels like you've stepped into the driver's seat of a synth-wave painting.

A round of applause

A unique blessing of indie games is that they have an implicitly given artistic license to reinvent beloved concepts in new and exploratory ways. Given the wrong incentives, you might end up with cash grabs re-releasing the same game year after year with DLC-level differences. But given the right incentives and a passionate developer, you get games that become the new classics for a genre.

Wave Rider's triumph is being a perfect increment of what came before. Long-time racing fans may shrug at its take on the formula, and others may yawn at its simplicity. But suppose someone was searching for a game with a particular identity. In that case, this is one of the games I would pull out: this is a solid example of a compelling racing game, this is a masterful interpretation of the synth-wave art style as a video game, and this is an excellent example of why indie games matter.