As it turns out, the difficulty cliff is in Arcade mode. This is split into three modes of play: Sprint, Challenge and Stunt. Sprint drops the player onto a track and has a race with five ghosts, most of which are from other players. Challenge is the same, but with significantly harder (yet shorter) tracks and no checkpoints. Stunt is the biggest departure of the three, throwing the player into an environment to rack up points by flipping and spinning through the air, driving on walls, grinding on barriers, etc. Finishing fast enough or getting enough points nets medals, with bronze, silver, gold, and the elusive diamond medals counting for one, two, three and four medals respectively. Earning enough medals unlocks more tracks, which are divided into a few sets and total 53 in all for Sprint, 13 for Challenge and only five for Stunt. It’s pretty clear where the focus of the game is and, despite the novelty of discovering new tricks, I’d wonder if Distance would be better off sacrificing Stunt for few extra Sprint or Challenge tracks.
Of course, that’s not counting all of the tracks from the campaign, personally made tracks or downloaded tracks, which can all help earn medals. It’s nice to have some flexibility for how some medals are earned to unlock content instead of being forced to grind away at a particular course or courses. As for the included tracks, the environments and difficulty vary wildly, with some teleporting the player through five or six different areas on the same stage. One moment I was in an old school Runescape-like world, the next I was in a field of lava, and then I was on some extra trippy interpretation of Rainbow Road. Some involve a bit of puzzle solving to figure out how to get to the finish. One space station track requires passing a series of trials to assemble and ride a ship able to reach the finish line. This creativity carries over to workshop tracks, made by players using a surprisingly sophisticated level editor allowing click-and-drag manipulation of track and environment pieces in a 3D plane. It’s overwhelming at first, but with time and patience there’s a lot that can be done with it.
Then there’s Trackmogrify. This odd little sideshow takes a sentence typed in by the player and automatically generates a track for it. It’s clearly a “just for fun” add-on, but the tracks usually aren’t anything special. The environments mix up a bit, but the obstacles and track layouts tend to get samey after the first five or six tries. It’s better to just create a custom track and name it after whatever word salad got dumped into Trackmogrify.
Custom tracks can be used in multiplayer as well. While there weren’t that many people on when I tried to join matches, I did manage to find a couple rooms with five or six people racing around custom tracks. My connection didn’t drop and there was little latency when spectating most racers. Doing anything beyond that was a struggle though. Some button queues in the menu for how to vote on tracks or chat with people would have been helpful, considering the controls aren’t visible without exiting to the main menu and looking up key mappings.
After a few updates, Campaign mode now has two extra chapters—Lost to Echoes and Nexus—adding a combined fourteen stages to the game’s initial seventeen. All three took me a little under three and a half hours to get through. I’ve spent about five hours on the various flavors of Arcade mode and still have a ways to go before completing everything. Even after finishing that, I still have a ton of user-made tracks to sift through and unlockables to earn.
All said, for $25 it’s hard to go wrong with Distance. The intensity and challenge are there, but don’t feel overwhelming outside of where it’s expected like, say, in Challenge mode. While the campaign’s attempt at storytelling can be hit or miss, the strength of its gameplay across all modes carries the day for it. Reckless and wild in all the right ways, Distance is the change of pace in racing games I didn’t realize I needed.
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Review copy provided by publisher.
