Retronika Review: An Effortless Journey

Retronika is a game that sparks mixed feelings. It’s not plagued with terrible design decisions, but in its current state of early access, it needs substantial adjustments in balance and tuning to become a must-play title.

When I first caught sight of a trailer, it sparked a sense of thrill and anticipation that lingered even when I finally got my hands on the game months later. The concept is straightforward yet captivating: a VR single-player racing action game where you’re steering a hoverbike with free movement, dodging and weaving while eliminating foes with laser guns. The narrative takes you on a journey back home from Earth, where you’ve ended up as an alien sucked through a wormhole, finding yourself in a future teeming with flying cars.

It’s an ambitious project, and the Dutch team at 4Players-Studio seems to have realized the importance of easing players gradually into the world of Retronika. The controls aim to emulate riding a real motorbike, with an added aerial twist. You stretch your arms out, grip the virtual handlebars, push the analog stick forward to accelerate, and pull it back to brake.

Handling the handlebars with one hand restricts movement to the horizontal plane. With both hands engaged, you gain full 3D movement, allowing you to deftly navigate around flying cars by pulling up or pushing down on the handlebars. This vertical movement is initially challenging, but early missions are designed to familiarize you with horizontal steering before granting full mobility. Even then, Retronika waits through another mission before introducing guns.

Your weapons automatically attach to the hand not holding the handlebars, allowing you to shoot at incoming drones attempting to thwart your mission. The goal is to clear linear challenges, racing through a 3×3 grid filled with other aerial cars, often requiring you to eliminate a set number of drones or reach a finish line within a time limit.

Visually, Retronika makes a powerful debut. It’s breathtakingly stunning and immersive in VR. The cityscape, while not hyper-realistic, is brought to life with cel-shaded models that feel vibrant beyond your restricted racing view. Cars clutter your racing path, but on the outskirts, you glimpse trains zipping by and skyscrapers towering above the clouds, with delivery speeders darting off-frame. The early levels allow you to cruise unhindered through the tracks, offering a chance to appreciate the environment and dream up stories for the unseen commuters.

However, it doesn’t take long for delight to sour into frustration. Every level comes with a limited health bar that diminishes from drone attacks, collisions with vehicles, or even when you fire your gun. Stray outside the narrow 3×3 racing grid, and your health plummets swiftly until you’re back on track. Often, you’ll find yourself barely escaping failure with over half your health already depleted.

Where Retronika stumbles most is in balance. As commendable as the lifelike portrayal of the environment is, the racing lanes are frequently overcrowded. Each square in the 3×3 grid can hold up to nine vehicles, making it feel like peak-hour traffic. Ideally, forcing players to find clear paths isn’t problematic, but the erratic and unpredictable movements of cars, often swerving in without warning, result in unnecessary crashes or send you out of bounds.

The enemy drones exacerbate the issue. These machines tail you and start firing almost instantly, often hitting you a couple of times before they’re even in view. They rarely miss, and switching your own weapons proves ineffective as your fire rate is too slow, and your gun power is too weak. You’ll often find yourself interrupting your ride, halting entirely, to fend them off with both guns, leaving you exposed to attacks or reckless NPC drivers that should probably have their licenses revoked.

Encountering multiple drones makes preserving your initial health a distant dream. Facing tougher, resilient white drones feels like flipping a coin on your chances of success. Victory and defeat seem governed by chance more than skill. Because the levels can be agonizingly long, failure means replaying entire segments, wasting minutes of progress, and after multiple retries, that initial enthusiasm wears thin.

In theory, upgrades could offer a solution, allowing you to enhance your bike and weapons using in-game currency earned by completing levels. Options include upgrading your radiator for better braking, turbine for higher speed, exhaust for faster acceleration, and handlebars for improved steering. Some, like the air and fuel intakes, are redundantly tagged for speed enhancements, making the upgrades confusing.

The effectiveness of these upgrades is questionable, often requiring numerous investments to notice a marginal difference. A more crucial need is enhancements in health and defense, yet despite teaser trailers showing a shield, it’s tied to a late-game unlock.

Moreover, upgrades come at a steep price. Progress through regular gameplay was insufficient to afford even a single upgrade, compelling me to replay earlier levels and grind for currency, which drained much of the joy from playing. Before long, revisiting Retronika for review turned into a tedious exercise, far from the initial excitement I had felt.

With Retronika still in early access, not all hope is lost. The gameplay basics are solid; driving feels responsive, it looks fantastic, and there’s a fair amount of variety with 50 missions and several weapons in tow. Balance adjustments are essential though. While adding difficulty options would be beneficial, changes to vehicle behaviors, drone accuracy, and options for health recovery and defense upgrades are necessary. As it stands, the game transitions from enjoyable to unforgivingly hard within ten missions.

Whether these areas will see improvements is uncertain. The development team has mentioned in their Discord channel that Retronika is nearing the end of its early access phase, implying significant changes might not occur before its full release. It’s a shame since there’s a truly enjoyable game underneath it all, one that doesn’t require major mechanical overhauls. However, substantial balancing is crucial to unlock its full potential.

As it currently stands, despite promising the exhilarating fantasy of riding a hoverbike in a bustling future city, Retronika isn’t quite the exhilarating experience it aims to be. And that, unfortunately, is quite the disappointment.