You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here
The concept behind DeathSprint 66 is clever, fun, and violent. A giant, corporate empire has a monopoly on all kinds of media; film, news, even sports. It decides the ultimate money making machine is to create endless clones of the same person, forcing them to race each other across neon runways towering over the city, and then televising the resulting gut-exploding violence for the world to see.
In as simple a comparison as possible, it’s the same milieu as Mario Kart and Rocket League. Beyond competitive modes, there’s not much of a campaign or offline play. There are the Episodes in which you race against a specific handicap (timers, speed, or other contestants), and there’s a Rehearsal mode too, but online matchmaking is where you will have the most fun.
DeathSprint 66 doesn’t hook you right away. But like Subway Surfers or Tetris, once you get the hold of the mechanics, you fall into that ‘flow state’ fast. Your first few sprints will end with you jerking to a halt around corners, slipping off the edge into a whirring plasma blade, or speeding into a wall of laser beams. It takes a while to learn how to conserve your momentum by drifting, or how to accelerate out of a corner, but once you do; resisting the high-octane flow is impossible.
The game doesn’t shy away from gore. One moment, you’re minding your own business scuttling across the track, the next, another contestant has fired a spinning buzz saw at you – chopping you in half. Now in two separate pieces, your still-beating lungs and heart will have fallen cleanly out of the hole in your torso, and the rest of your organs will have rag-dolled a football pitch’s length away from you. It sounds horrible, but in reality you can’t help but sneer at the stupid, homogenous sacks of meat that take part in this high-speed race for glory, often finding something else between the teeth of a serrated blade instead.
It wouldn’t be fun if it ended there though. A new clone takes your place, ‘a new body is ready’ says the commentator, and so the race continues – the speed picks up where you left off, the rails, walls, ziplines, and jump-pads become your running track once again.
Like in Mario Kart, there’s a pretty simple gameplay loop. You will find power-ups on the track – some will throw a buzz saw at the closest opponent, others will provide you with invincibility for a moment, while the rarest one is going to ‘Bullet Bill’ you forward a few positions. Likewise, you’re going to be able to connect energy points that can be used as a last-minute boost in the race. Using all three successively took me from sixth place all the way up to first in a matter of a few seconds, a particularly exhilarating memory from the game so far.
DeathSprint 66 isn’t perfect, though. So far it’s only on PC. While it has all the makings for virality, the only thing it’s missing is a home console to go viral on. Perhaps this is a symptom of the Sumo Group’s layoffs earlier this year? Regardless, it only costs £19.99 in the UK, which I will say is an absolute steal.
For the sake of brevity, DeathSprint 66 is a straightforward game. Literally – you run in a straight line and that’s about it. It has online play, a cosmetics system, rankings, and so forth. But, the game doesn’t exist solely for those. It’s one of the rare occasions where the game modes only seem to exist to give you more opportunity to partake in the Deathsprint. You won’t be ensnared by season passes and false promises of a new mode, feature, or exclusive power-up. Instead, the reason you can’t take your eyes away from the spectacle is because it’s just so bloody fun.
Like I said, the concept is simple. That doesn’t mean the game is shallow, or lacks any depth – there are some big ideas tucked away in DeathSprint 66. In a merger between Succession’s corporate satire and Robocop’s gory, gritty violence, there’s a clever backdrop of media totalitarianism. The Bachman Media Network owns everything. Its products are the adverts on its own channels, and its influence creeps over an entire city. Between races, a news ticker reveals Bachmann reporting on its own controversies; ‘scientists express concern over growing number of clones’, one might read, or ‘AI cleaner cleared of all charges in murder case.’
With DeathSprint 66, you become an integral part of this media network. You might not be Bachmann orchestrating the death race itself, but you are an active participant desperate for that ‘flow state’ – sweating as you narrowly dodge decapitation by a hair’s width and smirking as you nudge the back of a clone into the blades of a giant blender. The game captures that moment of morbid curiosity as a news notification pops up on your phone asking you to watch a video of someone dying brutally in a natural disaster or war, followed by that inevitable click. The violence only matters because you will watch it.
Code provided by Secret Mode, played on PC.
About the Author
