DeathSprint 66 review: amazing platforming, poor racing

DeathSprint 66 has some sharp platforming mechanics, but it's tied to tedious racing.

DeathSprint 66 / Secret Mode

There’s something truly exhilarating about sprinting. Running as fast as you can somehow feels dangerous. Each impact makes you slightly unsteady on your feet, and at max speed you’re doing more to control your momentum and inertia than you actually are to propel yourself along the ground. You become a hurtling mass of fleshy limbs, a split second away from tripping and bouncing along the concrete. You’re unlikely to meet an untimely demise from a simple trip while on a run, but in DeathSprint 66, it’s more than likely – it’s the name of the game.

DeathSprint 66 feels like a hybrid of a platformer and a racing game. As a clone sprinting at high speeds, you’re on the track with other racers, all pushing for position – literally pushing and shoving – while brushing against death constantly. Tracks are littered with laser grids and grinding gears that will have a clone’s fleshy composition splattering across the track.

When you’re locked in, focusing on getting the best position and time, it’s similar to other platformers that incentivize speed and precision. Like Neon White, you’ll be repeating the track time and time again to achieve the cleanest, fastest lap times. And when you’re locked in, grinding on rails and swaying to avoid death at every turn, it feels great.

It's a lot less exciting than it looks. / Secret Mode

But that’s where DeathSprint 66 starts to fall apart. Racing games, for the most part, are almost a meditative experience. There’s a level of self-satisfaction to each lap time PR, and then you get to flex that with others online. Even Mario Kart, with its random items and absurd track designs, has a sense of predictability. You know what items are coming up in which position, and what the counters for them are. 

But DeathSprint’s unique movement and platforming aspects work against what the best racing games manage to achieve. It feels like an intense platformer – as I said, death around every corner – and brushing up against those aforementioned obstacles is going to reset your character, putting you back a few positions. It feels brutal in a way that falling off the track in Mario Kart just doesn’t, and it slows your momentum down massively as other players race past.

As a speed-based precision platformer, DeathSprint nails everything it needs to in terms of the movement and kinds of obstacles you need in those levels. And if that’s what DeathSprint was, I think I’d love it. But instead of having, say, 80 short stages to sprint through and achieve best times on, it has a handful of racing tracks that are meant to be repeated, raced on, and lapped over and over again, in different modes, against different opponents – and it just doesn’t work.

DeathSprint 66 / Secret Mode

Going around the track in DeathSprint 66 is stressful, and I say that as someone who looks for a challenge. There are so many hazards in the way, and any time I drift off my usual lines I’m bamboozled by another. You will learn where they are and the best ways to avoid them in time, but it highlights a bigger problem: I don’t enjoy going around these tracks repeatedly. It feels like picking a single stage in a platformer and just hammering away at it, and even after you complete it, you hammer away some more. This is meditative in a relaxed time trial that you pick and choose when to play, but that’s all there is to DeathSprint.

There is a “PvE mode” where you can enjoy activities such as: run around the tracks and through rings, run around the tracks but beat a “hype score”, and run around the tracks but die fewer than five times. Yes, it’s all about running around the tracks. The same tracks. Repeatedly. Believe it or not, the best of the bunch here is running through rings, as each ring acts as an arcade-style racing checkpoint, adding seconds to your timer.

Those PvE challenges are disappointing, but the ones focusing on the “hype score” are entirely baffling to me. You get a hype score as you dash around tracks, but what exactly this is awarded for is a bit of mystery. All I know is that, according to the online leaderboards ahead of release, nobody actually beat the hype score necessary to clear the PvE challenge. I hope that isn’t true, but after attempting it a handful of times, not only did I feel like I was wasting my life, but I did not get anywhere near beating it.

DeathSprint 66 / Secret Mode

When deep in PvP, which really feels like the main meat of the game, you’ll be racing other players, charging past to push them into hazards, and collecting items that are laid across the tracks. Lightning bolts are everywhere, which add charge to your boost, which you can use to gain speed, while 66 tokens are dotted about, giving you Mario Kart-style items, only brutal. Instead of a green shell, how about a spinning buzzsaw?

Again, like Mario Kart, you’ll get better items when you’re falling behind, including a rush that feels a lot like a Bullet Bill, but unlike Mario Kart, you can’t tactically hold an item behind you, or send one behind to punish players hugging your butt. 

It feels like this game is supposed to be this neck-and-neck race between a bunch of equally skilled players, but in the games I played, this isn’t the case. I came first a few times, I ended up in the middle a few times, but other than when the game actually started, I rarely saw other players. Even when I propelled ahead, jumping from fourth to first, I wasn’t sure where my opponents actually were. Were they on a lower level and I drifted past? Did they hit a grinder and explode into meat chunks? I don’t know – but I always know in Mario Kart.

DeathSprint 66 / Secret Mode

It feels illegible in a way most games in the modern day don’t. I must confess, I’m colorblind, and I did not play with the colorblind modes available. I usually don’t, most games are fine without changing anything, but here I was surprised when I finally noticed a buzzsaw icon trailing my character. The cyberpunk style and flat-shaded icons just work against this game being legible. 

And we know that I got bored of the tracks, but they just felt so uninspired. There are 15 in total, and they’re all miserable-looking tracks from a dystopian future, but there’s no variety. The future doesn’t have a beach or an arena in the sky or something? All we get is dark, dreary cityscapes? I had to flick through the track list to remind myself, and all 15 really are sets of worn-down buildings with different colored fog to set each neon-lit track apart from one another. The only reason to commit any of them to memory is the obstacles.

This game could still work, maybe with significantly fewer obstacles, and a fair few more players to fill up these wide and empty tracks. You don’t need a bloody death to punish the player, slowing them down is fine. Make my clone trip and fall, forcing a hasty recovery, instead of just splashing my blood and guts up the wall. If it wants to be a racing game, it needs to work like a racing game, but the mechanics and tracks feel more like Titanfall 2’s The Pilot’s Gauntlet, only there are other pilots trying to complete it at the same time, ruining your run.

DeathSprint 66 / Secret Mode

There are moments playing DeathSprint 66 where it feels great, but those moments don’t involve your 50th time running a lap or getting shoved into the abyss by a player you could not see coming. If this game had unique levels to parkour-platform through and set times on, it’d be a slam dunk. Yes, I’m basically wishing it were a different game entirely, but it frankly feels like wasted potential. 

DeathSprint 66 could’ve been an amazing platformer, but it makes for a disappointing racing game.

Score 5/10

Platform: PC