a very silly game with weird bad physics, a lovably dorky soundtrack I will never listen to, and a strange turn of the century Japanese sensibility about what ‘80s America was

you interact a surprising amount with “the president,” (a bit crushed image of I’m pretty sure Bill Clinton, which in combination with the Dreamcasts appearing in both campaigns’ menus makes for a very weird ‘80s), and let's face it, what other game has ever had you assembling hot dogs using a car and delivering them to a Bill Clinton analog?

solid racing game which stops just shy of greatness because none of the tracks are in any way memorable - they’ve gone for a generated-from-prefab-blocks type of track system, which does mean you can generate your own custom ones (though you can’t manually edit individual segments, just influence the parameters of the generation algorithm) and they’re equally convincing versus the predefined ones, but there’s nothing to distinguish them

there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable

there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4

excellent fun with a good wheel, but I wish it were more interested in the tracks as a place, rather than just an immediately-discardable result of an algorithm's execution

Honestly another incredible demonstration of how free-to-play gacha mechanics just become obviously ghoulish when stripped of the payment.

You can feel how much the only consideration this game gave to being funded by Apple Arcade was to delete the payment function, and that means instead you're left with a lot of waiting around, and a difficulty curve hell-bent on making you "spend" to upgrade your team.

Ultimately, it's yet another Trek game which considers combat the primary function of an away team, and is worse off for it. Despite minor considerations given to the idea of characters having different skills and specialities, it's really mostly combat by volume.

The combat itself is serviceable but not really fun - once you land a good character combo, like Bones and Riker, it's pretty much going to play out identically each round of combat.

aesthetically fantastic, love it, and it’s got big things to say and it says them well, but I feel like a little flavour text in the beginning of the game (hell, the first ~25 seconds of the launch trailer would do a lot here) or between levels would’ve bound it together more for me (why am I delivering parcels? what does that have to do with taking photos? the answers are in articles about the game, but seemingly not in the game)

I wish the scavenger hunt type gameplay didn’t have the timer, as that seems counter to the concept of methodically lining up aesthetically pleasing shots - for a game boasting giving the player creative control it feels odd