DeathSprint 66 Review

Set in the apocalyptic-looking near future of 2066, Sumo Digital’s racing game DeathSprint 66 is a high-octane eight-player footrace where you use a variety of highly expendable clones to win races for glory and screen time. Along the way, you can expect to die many many times, with new clones popping in to replace whatever bloody corpse you leave behind. Now, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the racing genre, but I must admit I’ve found DeathSprint 66 a lot of fun. It has its ups and its downs, and goodness, is its setting depressing, but I do believe there’s something special here that helps the game stand out.

To start off with, this isn’t really a “story” kind of title. The 2066 future the game takes place in has definitely been considered, judging by a lot of the detail in advertisements around the tracks and the often-hilarious news reel running at the bottom in the menus, but from what I’ve seen, DeathSprint 66 puts its main focus on the multiplayer experience and leaves out any kind of plot. Basically, what’s there is that the Bachman Media Network controls essentially everything and they’ve set up a deeply unethical and bloody race to get people to watch television and presumably keep their iron grip on society. As an excuse to set up a gorefest with respawning mechanics, this is fairly solid and helps to solidify the nonchalantly violent tone DeathSprint 66 is going for.

Beyond that, this overall feels very much like a classic satire of reality TV like other bloody sporty games in the past and the classic Steven King novel, The Running Man. There’s also a warning here about growing monopolies taking over the world, all delivered in a comedic, tongue-in-cheek manner. There’s a decent amount here to chew on thematically, but what’s there is also rather direct, though that’s not a bad thing. In this way, even if someone is focusing on other details, they’re not going to be able to miss the basics of the DeathSprint world — it’s an awful place to live, one organisation controls everything, and the advertisements and content never ever stop.

That directness of the world is also greatly supported by other aspects of the overall presentation. While each track has unique elements and looks a little different, there’s a consistent bleak appearance they all share. Skyscrapers in disrepair, flooded streets, dirty-looking water, various dusty backgrounds, and harsh neon lights come together to build a pretty picture of a truly awful world. The soundtrack contributes as well with a variety of imposing and often harsh techno music that still manages to pump you up for a new race. The Track 5 theme in particular is a tantalising mix of eerie chords and an almost rebellious energy that reminds me of Street Fighter IV’s music.

Moving on, the star of the show is absolutely the gameplay. There’s a tutorial and some single-player missions, but the meat of the game is the multiplayer. You and seven other Clone Jockeys, the people controlling the Clones, line up for a deadly footrace. You have to sprint forward, run on walls, surge forward for boosts of speed, grind on rails, powerslide, drift, avoid hazards like lasers and rotating spits of doom, and try to force your enemies into those same hazards or off the track entirely. This can be a bit hard (though still absolutely doable) with your mouse and keyboard, but it’s nearly perfect with a controller. Even then, there’s a little bit of an early learning curve to get into the groove of the races, but with some time in the tutorial and some online matches, running down the track becomes a fluid spree of jumping, flipping, drifting, and narrowly avoiding the traps laid out around you. Admittedly, a lot of dying can still happen even then when your fellow racers get aggressive, the track becoming a, uh, fluid spree of getting vaporised, sawed in half, lasered in half, knocked off the course, and turned into a bloodsoaked mess.

I particularly adore running on the wall, which essentially shifts the track from a horizontal experience to a vertical one. At first, I’d assumed that my Clone would lose height over time when running on a wall, but thankfully, they stay on there very firmly, even able to move up and down with even more ease than they move side to side on the ground. It’s a very fun inclusion that helps to make the physical space DeathSprint 66 takes place in feel a bit more real and physical, especially when the track includes both a wall and a floor to hop between at will. One of my favourite feelings in the game is when I can get a jump off of a wall and onto a higher part of the track or through a narrow and risky gap.

Additionally, much like a kart racer, DeathSprint 66 also features a number of items to further your murderous rampages. There are two different saws, one that’s small and green and can bounce off the walls of the track like Mario Kart’s green shell, and one that is very large and can take up half the width of the track in some places and the entirety of it in others. In both cases, you can hear the sound of them cutting through the air behind you in addition to seeing a warning signal on screen. If you’re careful — or lucky — you can actually jump over them when they sound loudest; it may be tricky, but it is very satisfying.

There’s also an EMP, which will temporarily shock the other Clones, slowing them for a moment, emptying their charge meter, and potentially dropping them from a wall; a seeker drone that hones in on another racer and attempts to murderise them; and the Enraged Charge, which coats you in a red bull-like aura and smashes you forward down the track, obliterating any unlucky Clones in your wake. At first, I rather liked the Charge with how powerful it made me feel, but it does also sometimes have a tendency to send you off in deadly directions or leave you in very tricky situations, so it’s best used carefully and in straightforward sections of the track. Lastly, there are mines that you can leave behind you on the road — running into them will instantly kill you, even if you left them. It used to be the case that you could still bite it even if you’d managed to hop over them or narrowly dodged them, but in an early patch, that hitbox was shrunken down to a more reasonable size, landing the mines into a great sweet spot where you still have to be careful around them, but not to an obsessive degree.

On the whole, outside of some initial trickiness with the mines and some of the quirks with the Charge, the item selection is excellent, a solid set of six power-ups that will all be useful most of the time and can become especially useful in the right circumstance. There’s never going to be a moment where you forget what something does, nor are any of the items going to be annoying to receive in a pinch.

On reflection, what Sumo Digital has cooked up with DeathSprint 66 is very impressive, offering this frenetic-feeling footrace while still maintaining a great sense of control for the player and even mixing in other genre aspects, like a kart racer’s items, in ways that add to the overall experience without letting them take it over. Case in point, racing here is still exceptionally fun even when there’s not an item in sight.

As mentioned prior, there is also some single-player content to sink your teeth into, including some PvE segments where you have to play the game in specific fashions as quickly as possible to succeed. The Killing Time set involves racing along a given map alone, fighting against an ever-dropping clock to speed your way through rings that will grant you a few extra seconds. Here is where things get very hard. The main multiplayer mode is very brutal and can leave you dying over and over again, you can usually still finish a race, and even come in first, despite losing all five of your lives thanks to the Shame Suit — a humorous punishment where you’re forced into a crash test dummy suit instead of your chosen customisations for the rest of the race. The trick here is that you don’t actually lose anything but your pride when you get into the Shame Suit.

In the PvE, on the other hand, the slightest failure has a very high chance of completely ruining your chances at victory. While Killing Time, for instance, ostensibly gives you the same five-life limit, dying at any point is nearly guaranteed to eat into the few seconds you have and make finishing your required laps impossible. Because of this, you’ll have to restart the missions again and again, struggling to make the slightest improvements and avoiding the most miniscule of mistakes to shave off time and avoid shaving off your head. This can be very frustrating if you let yourself get worked up, but DeathSprint 66’s gameplay is tight enough that most mistakes feel like your own fault and like you can correct them with more practice. Then, once you can manage to finish one, the rush of joy at managing that feat is matched only by the knowledge that you now have that track figured out to some extent and can take that knowledge and experience with you back to the multiplayer.

Overall, DeathSprint 66 is a charming title, mixing some older design ideas with very tightly put together gameplay and an emphasis on speedy skill to make a fantastic little package. I’m not even a very large racing fan and I’ve absolutely adored trying to get better and better at the game over time. Sure, I’ve run into a few connection issues and lag, but that’s only ever happened when I’ve tried to play on EU servers with my friends while still in the US, so that’s probably on my end. Additionally, I’ve occasionally wound up respawning in odd locations, like being under the track, but most of the time, some wiggling around and moving a bit further ahead fixes things. There’s definitely some more updates needed to keep the game running perfectly smooth, but what’s there is already incredible.

Really, that leaves only one big issue remaining: the very odd lack of publicity. Like, I heard very little about DeathSprint 66 before its release and that hasn’t changed much since then. It seems that the game has found a dedicated audience, judging by the incredible Clone Jockeys I’ve gone up against online and the fantastic and vocal response I’ve been getting whilst streaming it over on GameGrin’s Twitch channel, but for a title this solid, you’d expect there to be a larger push. If you haven’t heard of DeathSprint 66 and it sounds at all interesting to you, I definitely recommend it.