Fortnite Rocket Racing

Review game Fortnite Rocket Racing, Fun for a few games, but not much content at the moment.

It seems like Fortnite is currently experiencing its third awakening.  I haven’t played Battle Royale in weeks because the opening menu constantly pulls me into a whirlwind of spin-offs disguised as new game modes.  One of them is Fortnite Rocket Racing, an arcade racer that combines elements of Rocket League and Fortnite. Although it’s still very early in the development process, this basic first draft is entertaining enough to suggest that this is the beginning of what could eventually grow into a fantastic standalone racing game. But even with 26 reasonably well-designed maps, smooth integration with Fortnite’s more extensive progression systems, and a simple cross-platform multiplayer setup for up to 12 players, Rocket Racing finds it difficult to maintain its appeal once you’ve seen past its clumsy vehicle handling and dubious multiplayer equilibrium. It’s hard to call this a victory royale, even with an excellent idea at its core.

Rocket Racing and the earlier Psyonix game, Rocket League, share the similarity of including toy cars performing amazing stunts that defy gravity. Rather, Rocket Racing modishly takes cues from games such as GRIP: Combat Racing, Wipeout, Rollcage, and Distance. Twelve vehicles compete to be the first to cross the finish line in this formulaic game. However, Rocket Racing adds a twist to the formula by having players drift to build up their boost meter, much like in Mario Kart, which gives them the ability to outrun the opposition once they get enough momentum. Your only goal is to maintain your maximum speed while carefully drifting, boosting, and generally avoiding other players or obstacles that would slow you down. Unlike other combat racers, this game lacks items or weapons on the map.

The depth that jumping and flying add only serves to enhance this already compelling idea. Tapping a button propels your car into the air, while holding down the same button allows you to fly (at the expense of your vehicle’s speed). Similar to distance, you can use the jump and flight controls on your vehicle to swiftly avoid an obstacle by clinging to a wall or ceiling. It’s great that each map has different obstacles and alternate pathways to keep things interesting. You have to be careful when choosing your approach because it’s easy to miss speed boosts placed on the track or drift into a hazard, which can explode and respawn you behind the rest of the pack.

The key to winning is speed boosting, and there are a few ways to theoretically get ahead of the pack fast. In practice, all of this thrusting and boosting feels fantastic, but there are a few mysterious systems at work that aren’t always clear-cut or equitable, which is where Rocket Racing’s issues start to show. For example, depending on your precise timing, you can gain up to 100% extra speed by pressing the gas at the start of each match. However, even with perfect timing, I felt like I was only consistently hitting 35–40% of the boosts.

Its brief races are a comfortable diversion in between other pursuits.

It’s good that Rocket Racing makes the extra effort to assist you in catching up to those who are trailing you if you fall too far behind without requiring much work from you. However, it seems like my drifting and precise steering don’t go nearly as far to keep me ahead as they should, even when I’m obviously ahead of everyone else. Suddenly, other players will emerge from nowhere and take the lead, snatching my first place before I even get to the finish line. Given the significant performance gaps Fortnite aims to bridge with its cross-platform matchmaking, it makes sense that safeguards are in place to keep matches more engaging until the very end. However, when Rocket Racing penalizes you for performing well, it quickly ruins the fun of competing.

Like virtually every other Fortnite game, there isn’t a lot of setup or story to be concerned about. Simply tap a button to start the matching process and get ready to go. Rocket Racing offers the advantage of being one of those fun casual games that can be played in between other activities, as each match lasts only three laps, or roughly three minutes. Because of Fortnite’s popularity, you’ll almost always have a friend to play against, and you’re not committing to a 15- or 20-minute multiplayer match like in Fortnite Battle Royale, where you can probably finish four or five races in that amount of time.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be possible to play against other players locally, at least not on the Xbox Series X. This is unfortunate because it seems like a must for casual racers. Given that Fortnite is free to play, I’ve already installed it on every platform I own, so it’s at least pretty simple to get around that. Its performance scales between the Nintendo Switch and PC quite well, too, so regardless of the hardware I was using, I could compete against other players at about the same level of skill. Whatever system I or they were playing on, I didn’t feel nearly as bad when I partied with friends across platforms as I might when I was playing Battle Royale.

Notwithstanding a few provider-related network problems that I encountered over the course of a whole weekend on every system I used to test Rocket Racing, the experience is fluid and tight regardless of how powerful your gaming PC is. The ingenuity underlying Fortnite’s multiplayer systems has always astounded me; in Battle Royale matches, more than a hundred players can coexist simultaneously on the same map, regardless of their hardware. Rocket Racing’s chaos and fast-paced action make me appreciate the previously mentioned wizardry even more, considering how difficult it must be to keep everyone in check with so much going on in such a small area.

The primary issue is that Rocket Racing is currently lacking in content.

Rocket Racing’s primary issue is that, at the moment, not much exists in it. However, only a few of the 26 maps are ever distributed, creating the impression of a limited selection. To lessen the blow, Fortnite still allows you to scroll through a list and choose which map to play at a time. This is especially helpful if you’re tired of the widely used rotation, but the way it currently does this isn’t very practical. If you choose to use general matchmaking instead of manually selecting a particular map from the list each time, the time it takes to find a match decreases significantly. Moreover, you can’t just pick and choose a bunch of maps to create a personalized playlist.

Players find those maps well-designed and entertaining to replay, even the ones that are repeatedly played. For example, the obstacle-filled tunnels in Bone Cavern encourage players to use flying and wall-riding in a clever way. It can also be entertaining to watch other players miss their jumps and land head-first into danger. These kinds of moments are so hectic that they immediately bring to mind video games like Fall Guys or Mario Party.

Customizing an automobile, however, is an absolute no-go. Even though you can unlock various visual car designs, all of these unimpressive toy cars handle exactly the same and don’t perform any differently at all. Other than earning the meager number of cars available on the higher tiers of the Fortnite Battle Pass, it’s actually unclear how to unlock new vehicles and cosmetics. It’s boring to look at the same cars over and over again until I have to pay V-Bucks for the privilege of owning different and better-looking rides, I guess.

I’m unsure about the incorporation of Rocket Racing into Fortnite’s Battle Pass and progression systems. One way or another, I like that my Rocket Racing levels are helping me advance in Battle Royale and vice versa. Furthermore, the cars I eventually acquire can also serve as skins for other vehicles in the Battle Royale mode. However, once I grow tired of Rocket Racing, I feel like I’ll spend the majority of my leveling to obtain those cars in other game modes. After that, it will just become another minigame that I disregard in favor of everything else in Fortnite’s ever-expanding arsenal.

Conclusion

If you enjoy arcade racing games or Fortnite, Rocket Racing is definitely worth a few rounds. However, it doesn’t yet have enough appeal to draw players away from other well-liked multiplayer games like Mario Kart or Rocket League. While its undeveloped racing mechanics, dearth of content, and lack of local multiplayer mean it struggles to stay fresh for too long, its quick races are still fast enough to keep me entertained in between other activities, and I love how simple and easy it is to get online friends playing together across platforms.