New Star GP Review (Switch eShop)

Every now and then you get an indie developer who you can rely on to deliver a banger pretty much every time. New Star Games is one such developer, having already scored healthy scores on Nintendo Life in the past for New Star Manager (which scored 8), Retro Bowl (9), and Retro Goal (8).

Alongside its Switch releases, it’s also been responsible for a bunch of fantastic mobile games, including the likes of the New Star Soccer series, New Star Cricket, and New Star Baseball. Essentially, everything New Star touches turns to gold, but it’s also fair to say it has a style of game it’s best known for: retro-style sports games.

With New Star GP – named after an old top-down racer it released years ago – the studio has gone for something very different from the typical output fans are used to. Rather than going with another 2D style sports game with ‘lifestyle’ career options, it’s stepped way out of its comfort zone and offered a polygonal F1 racing game that’s more Virtua Racing than Virtua Striker.

Thankfully, the results show that New Star Games is more than a one-trick pony, and New Star GP is just as entertaining, engaging, and moreish as anything else previously released by the developer. That said, however, it does have one rather bothersome niggle that should be pointed out.

First though, the good (and there’s plenty of it). The game has two main modes: Championship and Career. The former has you choosing an F1-style car – you can play as a typical model from the ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s, 2010s, or 2020s – then selecting a manufacturer to get the colour that suits you best.

You can work your way through a series of multi-race championships, each of which ranges from three to ten races, and offers a themed selection of the game’s 34 courses. One championship, for example, is called the Hill Climb Track Cup and focuses on courses that have their fair share of inclines.

Championship mode is a good option if you’re just looking for a quick burst and play through a few races, but it’s the Career mode where the main meat of New Star GP lies. Like many of the other New Star games, it’s focused more on taking you through a lengthy racing career and juggling various other outside elements.

Career starts you off in the 1980s, and has you working your way through all five decades by playing through a series of races, gaining points along the way in typical F1 style. Where it differs from the usual F1 routine, however, is that instead of having to set a time on qualifying sessions with empty tracks, it instead makes things more entertaining by giving you an optional separate race with a different rule set, which you can take on for bonus cash and trophies before moving on to the main race itself.

These optional challenges could be Checkpoint races (where you have to drive through a set number of checkpoints before the time runs out), Elimination races (where the racer in last is eliminated when a timer runs out), Time Trials (where you have to complete a certain number of laps within a time limit) or what have you. Nothing here is revolutionary in any way – if we had a nickel for every racing game with an Elimination race type in it, we’d be able to afford our own F1 car in real life – but it at least adds a bit of variety instead of being ‘qualify, race, qualify, race’ ad nauseam.

It wouldn’t be a New Star game without some sort of management aspect taking place outside of the actual playing of the sport, and New Star GP is no different. Here you have to keep your team happy because they each provide different benefits, but this means there are occasions when you have to make difficult decisions which will inevitably upset some of them.

If you mess up a race and fail to finish on the podium, who are you going to throw under the bus if you’re interviewed and asked who’s to blame? Will you point the finger at the engineers and risk the possibility of them leaving the team, resulting in you losing certain perks that improve your car’s performance? Or will you blame your commercial manager and risk making less money for a win? Again, it’s hardly a Masters in psychology and none of these mistakes are going to change the game to a Telltale-level degree, but it’s a bit of fun that once again mixes up the usual racing game routine of winning races, upgrading the car, and repeating until it’s maxed out.

All this would be for naught, of course, if the game itself wasn’t actually fun to play, and thankfully New Star GP doesn’t disappoint. For the most part. Taking clear inspiration from Virtua Racing, the basic polygonal graphics give the game a similarly clean, stylised look to Sega’s seminal arcade racer, and things look nice and sharp whether playing on TV or in handheld mode.

Handling is satisfying and provides enough of a challenge without taking things too seriously, meaning you can’t just career around turns with the accelerator taped down but you also have a bit of freedom to cut some corners and bump into opponents without it instantly ending your race. It’s a delicate balance to walk and New Star does so with gusto.

The main issue we have is that, regardless of which of the numerous camera angles you decide to play with, the game struggles with frame rate. It runs much smoother on other systems, and while other multi-format games would suggest that you’d expect a drop in performance on the Switch, the low-poly art style means we’ve got to wonder if there was more room for optimisation somewhere.

While we appreciate there’s a greater level of detail here than in the Switch’s Sega Ages version of Virtua Racing, the fact that port runs at a flawless 60 frames per second whereas this struggles to maintain any real stability means that if you play Sega’s game then move straight onto New Star’s, the latter feels sluggish and less polished by comparison. To be clear, it’s not like it drops to 15fps or anything ridiculous like that, and it’s still perfectly playable, but it is noticeably choppy at times.

Still, that’s merely one notable issue in what’s otherwise a great racing game, one which pays tribute to the early days of polygonal racers while still offering enough ideas to make it stand out on its own. Fans of the New Star games curious about how different this looks from the team's typical fare can rest assured that the same level of compelling ‘one more go’ gameplay continues to take pole position here.