The Running Men

There are few studios out there with more racing game credits than Sumo Digital. That fact may surprise folks out there, but their various divisions have worked on everything from OutRun 2 to Hotshot Racing to fucking Forza. Their kart racers are a little bit more scattershot – some of the Sonic ones are good, meanwhile Stampede: Racing Royale very much isn’t – but you get the idea. At this point the one subgenre they were missing was an on-foot racer, and it looks like they took that extremely personally.

I won’t bury the lede; it turns out Sumo Digital has absolutely still got it. DeathSprint 66 is another banger item-infused kart racer with a bonkers sense of speed and excellent course design, it’s just on foot and has a bit more red on it than usual. That on-foot-ness matters far more than many prior games in the subgenre as we’ve got wallruns, grinds, jump pads, sliding that lowers your profile as well as functioning as a drift, and some of the coolest and cruelest track design you’ll ever see.

Before we dig into that though, I need to acknowledge how good this game’s presentation is. You play as a clone jockey, and your steed is a cloned human encased in a full-body running suit complete with a forward-thrusting boost pack. These clones are made purely to be thrown into the gore-slicked grinder for the amusement of the audience, and the courses’ litany of one-shot kill hazards as well as the obligatory arsenal of items mean you will churn through plenty. In what I suspect is the result of a budgetary measure, 5 deaths in 1 race will see you swapped to the Shame Suit, a walking crash test dummy that doesn’t sport your cosmetics. Don’t fret about that term by the way, everything’s unlocked through gameplay.

Ok, context is established, back to violence. Races are nasty, brutish, and short. The courses are simultaneously built to punish the greedy and reward the bold. With a bit of skill you can earn boost constantly, which not only speeds you up but also raises your top speed cap. Soaring through the air in sections where you’re generally expected to jog is an incredible sensation, and one that I’ve yet to see an equal to in any on-foot racer. Make a mistake and you get fucked (albeit in an explosion of comical gore), but slam boosts perfectly, lean through your turns to dodge obstacles, hit your lines, and ye shall be as an adrenaline-fueled god.

What’s here will likely only appeal if you are a racing game sicko. There’s barely any solo content beyond a list of challenges. The game constantly pushes you to play the PVP, which has exactly one mode/queue: an endless series of back to back races. It’s a testament to the quality of the racing that this works at all, that its lobbies have (at time of writing) stayed mostly full, and that I am so compelled to keep coming back for more. My only real gripes lie with the waiting between racings occasionally stretching far longer for seemingly no reason, but that’s likely the fault of iffy internet connections or players deciding to quit early. I like to imagine they don’t want me to plant a landmine directly on the jump pad again.

Here at Pixel Die, we love going fast. I’m pleased to report that this game’s sense of speed is so great that at times it peaks at F-Zero GX levels, and if you know you know that there’s scarcely higher praise a racing game can earn. Granted it’s a lot more work to get there, and you’ll often only hit it briefly before flying face first into a meatgrinder for your first couple hours, but stick with it and you’ll experience some of the finest euphoria the genre has to offer. There may only be so much content in DeathSprint 66, but what’s here is polished to a mirror sheen and has a hell of an edge. Give me this over yet another doomed live service game any day.

8/10