Table Top Racing: World Tour

The sequel to the wildly successful combat-racer Table Top Racing, Table Top Racing: World Tour strives to bring the carnage of its mobile released predecessor to our living rooms. Inspired by the classic Micro Machines series, this PS Plus freebie sees you speed your way across table-sized arenas and fight towards the finish line.

Table Top Racing: World Tour presents players with more than just its destructive combat-fuelled races, as it features a wealth of different events. Among the highlights are pursuits, where you must exhaustingly chase down a much faster vehicle and then slam into the back of it. There's also elimination races, where the unlucky racer caught in last place is forced to go home at the end of each lap. These race types may not be anything we haven't played through before, but they still make for a number of quick and fun distractions.  

These race types are split into two main categories; championships and special events. Championships essentially make up the game's career mode and are concluded with a grand prix style tournament where you'll fight for your spot on the podium. Special events differ as they are standalone challenges where you are tasked with using a particular vehicle in order to participate. The championships in particular are quick to exhaust themselves as little is thrown in along the way to mix up the experience.

Many of the items that you'll stumble upon across the track are disappointingly dull. Although they fail to have too much of an impact on races, this is probably by design given the relatively short length of the tracks: anything too potent would be overpowering. Admittedly, the freeze beam is pretty satisfying to use, as you're able to transform your opponents into a block of ice and watch as they slide over the table top. But besides that, even common speed boosts don't feel like a valuable pick up, as they're only able to provide your micro-sized motor with a slight injection of speed.

Visually the game is bright and dynamic, and its five main set pieces are expertly decorated with their own unique obstacles for you to manoeuvre around. Arguably the stand out of the five is an eighties inspired playroom, which is embellished with vinyl records, blocks of Lego, and dusty old trading cards. While these set pieces feel alive and have their own identity, they quickly feel tired as they are too heavily relied upon. During the later stages of the career for instance, these tracks are overly recycled with only slight variations to help ramp up the difficulty.

After tearing your way through events you'll be rewarded with a sum of coins that is dependant on your finishing position. Your hard-earned cash can then be showered on new cars and upgrades in the garage. Split into three tiers, each available car is beautifully designed and they range from Breaking Bad inspired RV's to souped-up sports cars. The main issue is that once these upgrades are implemented, races become far too easy, as opposing racers struggle to compete with your freshly pimped out ride.

The lack of local multiplayer is a sad reminder that grouping together to play with friends is all but a dwindling memory. This is disappointing as similar titles such as Mario Kart and Micro Machines are often looked back on fondly due to their inclusion of offline competitive modes. There is the option to play online with up to eight players, but matches are often quickly soured, as players will quit mid-game due to their frustrations.

The Supercharger DLC Pack coincided with the launch of the main game and includes the addition of new cars, maps and championships. While the new features do help to enhance the overall experience of the game, there is no escaping the feeling that they should have been included it from the onset and that it was only partitioned off to monetise the game further while it's free for so many via PS Plus. We wouldn't mind paying for it under these particular circumstances, but having this as paid content when the game launches on PC and Xbox One (and when it's a standard release on PS4) wouldn't feel right. The new championship events also feel pretty pointless, simply mirroring every tournament you would have played so far and adding very little in the way of variation.

Table Top Racing: World Tour looked set to follow the illustrious path forged by its highly popular mobile predecessor, but instead it fails to make the podium because of a number of under the hood problems. The lack of local multiplayer, some uninspired pick-ups, and the limited number of settings are just few of the flaws that prevent this combat-racer from keeping up with the competition. It's adrenaline-fuelled gameplay may feel exciting the first few times around the track, but sadly it's short lived due to a lack of variation during the races.