Aqua Moto Racing Utopia Preview

Early Access games are always a risk: you are helping pay for development and as a result you can never really tell what you are going to get. With Aqua Moto Racing Utopia you can tell exactly what you are going to get. Naff all.

The models are simplistic and ugly, the sound effects seem to have been sampled on a Fisher Price Rappin’ Recordin’ Microphone, and the controls are sluggish though if you are using a keyboard, don’t always work. Mine died after the second buoy in a race every single time. The developers have also fallen for the console port trap of only displaying the Xbox One controls on the screen in the tutorials not even mentioning the PC controls, pretty much the biggest no-no in my book if you want people to even give you the time of day.

Zorbix did get in touch once I reported the keyboard problems and spent some time asking some pertinent questions instead of just writing me off as a lunatic which was good of them. Hopefully they will be able to track the problem down and get it fixed soon.

Add in to this lack of options in the game, I couldn’t even move the game from my secondary Monitor to the primary, and this is a complete travesty of a game. Having looked at the steam community hub, the developers recommend using RegEdit to change this until resolution and graphics options arrive in “a future update”. If Zordix AB want to make a go of this game, being able to change the resolution and updating the UI are a minimum. No, your position of “at least our performance is good” is not an excuse Zorbix, not even close.

I would mention the stunts and later races, but I’ve not seen them. My control pad is dead after I spilled coffee in it and the keyboard controls dying makes it a little hard to get to the finish. On the subject of controls, it doesn’t exactly endear you to a game when sat at the start line trying to figure out what accelerate is and only pounding the escape key in frustration enables one to finally discover that it is the spacebar.

Oh and don’t expect motion blur or shadows. They aren’t in the game yet and reading the fora on Steam implies that Motion blur at the least will not be included. They have written it off as “a love/hate thing”.