Aqua Moto Racing Utopia (PlayStation 4) Review

This aquatic-based racer has a gameplay set-up none too different from other titles of the genre. After creating a character, gamers are given multiple racing options to test their skills on, including championship, quick race, and multiplayer, both split-screen and online. Championship is the meat of the game; in it, players will complete in multiple circuits in an effort to reach the top spot, while also earning cash, but more on that later. Each circuit is classified by their difficulty, which also reflects what tier of watercraft can be used in competition.

Races play out as they should, with participants competing against each other over the span of three to five laps, and the tracks, though limited in numbers, are well-designed, and are set in different locales, such as city arenas, the backwaters of a Far-East city, and the marshlands. A curveball thrown into the racing comes in the form of specially-marked buoys that must be passed through; if up to three are missed, the player is automatically kicked out of the competition. Though this provides an added challenge to the proceedings, they can be a chore to complete due to their generally poor placement around the tracks that result in unnecessary stop-gaps. Sometimes, they're placed too close, which means everybody is turning slowly through them, but in other circumstances, they might be placed in a far-off corner where it's possible to forget said buoy that's been placed over there, which results in an accidental penalisation.

As mentioned earlier, cash can be earned by not only completing tournaments, but by also collecting special money icons scattered around each track. Unfortunately, cash can only be spent on new watercraft and nothing else. While an upgrade system would have been nice, the vehicles, despite their varying stats, don't feel different in the slightest, so racers always have a chance of staying in first place. Speaking of which, the AI, while not terrible, has a tendency to either get hung up on geometry or smack head-on into buoys, ensuring the player that he or she will come out on top.

Aqua Moto Racing Utopia's biggest problem, however, is that the experience is quite short. All of the cups can be completed within a matter of minutes, so each championship, in the grand scheme of things, takes around an hour to finish, and there isn't much else of interest, outside of the quick race options and a third tournament option focused around performing as many stunts as possible. Unfortunately, this mode is lacking in thrills, as the game often fails to register the inputs necessary for performing tricks, causing the racer to just fly through the air and land in the water with no stunts pulled off.