An homage to racers of the past, but not enough fuel for racers of today
4PGP is an homage to 90s arcade racers, where our sole goal was to race F1 style cars against each other in 3D. That era was generally memorable for us because it was the first time we ever really took to a virtual track in that view. Polygons, baby!
4PGP tries to capture that as much as possible. It looks nice, it controls well, and its tracks are solid – but by being too much of an homage it also doesn’t capitalize on modern tastes. Yes, there’s such a thing as being too true to the old days. There just isn’t much here in the game beyond cars and tracks.
Granted, I enjoyed the actual racing of the cars around the tracks. Yes, all of the vehicles look essentially identical, and yes the soundtrack audio doesn’t kick in until the third lap typically leaving us to just hear the car engines for ⅔ of a race, but it’s quite fun to control the cars, cutting corners and making our way to the front of the pack. Well, in HOPES of making our way to the front. It is, unfortunately, highly unbalanced without assists turned on, leading to extremely challenging races early on.
The cars all have ratings that indicate speed, control, acceleration, but they’re not equals. That is, the further we slide along the list of cars the more powerful they get in all categories. I can’t understand why someone would want to use the lower end vehicles because the higher spec are better in every way. Later on we can unlock more cars by playing and ranking higher, but as I said above, that can be a little more challenging than we’d want it to be.
I often spend the first few runs of any racing game learning how to control and play, and understanding that I’m not going to win right away. The average person doesn’t “just know how to drive a race car” in real life so it should feel normal to take time to get better here too. But it’s such a curve that we need more than just skills, we absolutely need those better cars to get further ahead in the races, and that feels like stuff added to a game to prolong playing it.
It would be great if there was more to do than just go around the same few courses over and over again, but there isn’t. For a game that’s about racing others, there’s so few of it. Multiplayer racing is stuck to local modes, meaning that I can’t hop into a race with people around the world. Again, I realize that we’re trying to match the 90s in spirit, but that makes for a far less sustainable experience overall.
4PGP executes the basics well, but there’s nothing else to keep the headlights on for.
This review is based on a Switch 2 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest for February 22, 2026.
No Comments