Review | Deathsprint 66 - Death On Two Legs
Have you ever wanted to play Mario Kart, but instead of coursing around tracks in a multitude of vehicles, it's just you and your own two legs? This is the core notion behind Deathsprint 66, a game that throws you into a brutal futuristic sports gameshow that pits eight competitors, or rather, eight clones, against each other. Spicing up the races is the ability to grind on rails all the while avoiding death traps, and, grab a wide range of powerups, ranging from fast circular saws to explosive homing drones.
The competitors, known, in the fashion of a playground insult, as clone jockeys, can gleefully murder each other's clones with zero consequence, while getting killed just means waiting a few seconds to respawn back onto the track. It’s an inherently cool concept, combining parkour, precision platforming and an almost Super Meat Boy-esque approach to wanton death. Despite this, it can’t quite juggle all these elements effectively.
The gameplay is split into several different modes. My first port of call was the PvE challenges, called Episodes, which pair the tough racing with strict criteria like finishing the race with fewer than five deaths, beating a par score, or a checkpoint race. These are fun, but also punishingly difficult, far more difficult than a standard race. If you start the game after reading this review, leave the Episodes until you’re a lot more confident in your abilities as a death sprinter. The other offline mode is Rehearsals, essentially a practice mode. You pick a track, choose whether to have AI contestants or not, and just race. Finally, you have the Showtime mode, an eight-player PvP race, and this is where the game really comes to life.
You see, the AI clone jockeys are ridiculously consistent in a way that human players can’t be. They use powerups incredibly (and infuriatingly) well, leading to frustration that just isn’t there when you race other players. Hop online and you’ll be racing against players who are every bit as fallible as you are, and it’s both easier and more satisfying to podium, not having just been hammered by the AI every step of the way. While the game might call its PvE races Rehearsals, don’t be fooled – the best and most enjoyable way to learn the game is by taking on other humans.
This is where one issue raises its head – the game’s low player count. It’s not the developer’s fault and you can consistently find a match, but you’re likely to see some racers again and again. At the time of writing, the game had just 17 players in the past 24 hours on Steam. The game is only on PC at this time, so unless it has a sudden spike in interest, perhaps following this review by my devilishly handsome self, there’s a decent chance that you’ll end up playing against at least some bots in the PvP mode too, which as already established, is not a fun way to play.
While there’s not been any evidence that points to this, it has the feel of a game that’s waiting to go free-to-play. It already has a decent array of cosmetic customisation options. While your clone will always look like a person in a full-body suit, you can choose different suits to give yourself some extra flair, as well as a few other cosmetics, such as a background for your player info, reminiscent of Call of Duty’s calling cards.
In addition to the tortuous difficulty of the bots, the game is held back by some technical issues. Despite having a pretty capable machine (i7-12700F, Nvidia Geforce RTX 4070, 32GB RAM), the game suffered from occasional frame drops, which is particularly punishing due to the precise nature of Deathsprint’s movement. There were also a few issues around hitboxes – occasionally, it appeared as though my clone clipped straight through lasers with nary a scratch, while other times they got zapped into a pile of assorted organic bits by a laser that they very clearly didn’t make contact with. It’s possible that this may be an issue with the netcode more than anything else, but it’s frustrating either way.
Finally, we have an issue that really stuck in my craw: the game punishes you for doing badly. As previously mentioned, I spent a lot of time sucking at this game, particularly when playing against bots. This, by itself, isn’t a problem: I’ve sucked at many a game before now, and I will in the future, but if you die too many times, you’re forced to wear a suit of shame, an outfit that makes your clone look like a crash test dummy. What is this, except the chicken hat from Metal Gear Solid V foisted upon you for not meeting the game’s expectations? It’s immensely frustrating – I know that I am not doing well, this is evidenced by the fact that I’m repeating the same race on the same track for the fifth time. The game doesn’t need to point its finger and laugh at me for it. Judging by the number of times I saw other players die in the online mode, almost all of us were wearing it by the end of the match. It sucks and feels like nothing more than a clarion call for the world’s most depressing gamers to jump out of their holes and mock other players.
Despite these flaws and the low player count, Deathsprint 66 is genuinely a fun time when you enter a flow state and the systems can sing. It somehow manages to balance both the feel of Mario Kart and its dystopian “Running Man” setting with aplomb. If you’re happy to join a small community of clone jockeys, you’ll have a good time. Just let us play badly next time, please.
