Our team can all fit round a table. There’sonly ten of us,” says New Star Games’ community manager Mark Baldwin. “We’ve never done anything like this before, it’s completely out of our comfort zone.” Well, if that’s the case, how come the studio’s Grand Prix game is packing more features than many full-price racers? Let’s get under the carbon fibre bodywork and take a look.
Visually, New Star GP’s flat-shaded polygons nod to Sega’s 1993 arcade classic Virtua Racing, but it feels deeper thanks to some impressively interwoven sim-like additions including staff management, car upgrades, and driver rivalries. But just like its arcade inspiration, New Star GP distils the sport. This pick-up-and-play ethos looks likely to set New Star GP apart from its peers. “The way that we always try to do our games is to squeeze down everything into short play sessions. I think it comes from our past doing mobile games. In New Star Soccer, you just play the attacking moments. Retro Bowl, again, it’s just the attacking parts. When we approached this, we were like ‘How can we get a GP-like feel to something and just boil it down to five or six minutes?’”
Despite the races’ brevity, it’s a large game. “I reckon it’ll take 40 to 50 hours for most people to play everything when it launches,” says Mark. “And that’s before you even play split-screen multiplayer and custom championships.”