The prolonged fashion for retro in the wake of imitations and the desire of many teams to save on art, still sometimes leads to amazing projects that would never have come out if the market had not been ready to accept numerous strange, often unreasonably popular products that exploit the love of older players for their first games.
Horizon Chase, which was published yesterday in the App Store by the Brazilian studio Aquiris, which is mainly engaged in creating games “based on” for companies such as Cartoon Network, Disney, Warner Bros., is just one of such amazing games, the possibility of the existence of which outside the modern gaming market is hardly possible to imagine.
The genre of the project is arcade racing. It would seem that within the framework of this genre it is possible to offer an original to players from a retro position, and is it necessary to experiment in this way, to flirt with nostalgia, given that only EA and Gameloft are closely engaged in racing topics on mobile platforms within the Need for Speed/Real Racing and Asphalt series, respectively?
As Aquiris demonstrated, there is a sense, but only in ideological terms, only those who found racing projects of the very end of the 80s – early 90s, even before the Need for Speed franchise, which used a three-dimensional environment from the very beginning of the series, could share their point of view before the release.
The project of the Brazilian studio, as we already wrote in our announcement at the beginning of August, is an attempt to implement the mechanics and sensations of playing sprite racing with modern development tools, like Turbo Challenge, Outrun and Top Gear, which were full of conventions and moments due to the need to optimize the game as much as possible.
Today, developers have not been faced with such problems for a long time, which were difficult to solve then, so the low-sitting camera, the backgrounds that cannot be reached, the zebra fields, the conditional collision system, and many other things that are difficult to even remember today have gone down in history.
Aquiris decided to implement all these aspects of racing games of those times stylistically in her game, but to do it in such a way that Horizon Chase not only evoked certain feelings among the older audience, but also that all her “oddities” were perceived as interesting, original finds.
The merit of the Brazilians is that they did not approach this literally. They still came from modern tools and its capabilities. Therefore, there are no pixel graphics or sprite models of cars in the game, on the contrary, the project looks as modern as possible, but at the same time visually clearly correlates itself with projects thirty years ago.
The same applies to the gameplay, management, a number of little things that are comfortable, but at the same time they are not ordinary. In general, the project stands out from the racing titles, which, of course, should be noted.
You can download the game here.