If you told me five years ago that Tokyo Xtreme Racer would be making a comeback after almost two full decades away, I’d have laughed, then sobbed. But here we are, weeks away from the end of 2024, and a new TXR is in the works for PC and possibly consoles too, with developer Genki eyeing a launch sometime next year. Up until now, we’ve seen only pre-rendered trailers and stationary car reveal teasers, but a new video Genki shared on the official website has given us our first look at gameplay.
For those unfamiliar, TXR was a series of street racing games set on Tokyo’s highways, uniquely designed to play more like a fighting game than a traditional racer. Players cruise around a highway system challenging rivals ad-hoc, so no two encounters are ever identical or occur on the same stretch of road. Rather than a fixed start or finish line, battles are decided by a depleting health meter; the farther you are ahead of your rival, the quicker theirs diminishes. That makes for a high replayability factor, as does the golden-era JDM aesthetic.
On the surface, there’s nothing extraordinary about the footage here. In classic TXR fashion, we observe two cars engaged in a high-speed duel on Tokyo’s Shuto Expressway, screaming through narrow tunnels and over majestic suspension bridges. The racers are also weaving between non-racing vehicles, but it’s important to note that this is not regular road traffic; they’re staged, rolling obstructions of a “sealed-off future Tokyo,” based on the title’s description on Steam. Indeed, while TXR doesn’t appear to have changed much in 20 years, standards for permissible behavior in video games very much have. You can watch it all below.
While there’s not a ton of meat to these clips (and I wish they were higher res), that almost doesn’t matter. The fact is that Tokyo Xtreme Racer is back, nobody ever thought it would be, and everything looks acceptable enough in motion—that alone is cause for excitement. We do get glimpses at a selection of cars that Genki hadn’t yet confirmed in the game’s roster, ranging from a Toyota bB to a final-gen Mitsubishi Eclipse. We also get a peek at visual and performance upgrades, and it seems you’ll be able to add underglow and nitrous to your rides, in addition to all the typical aftermarket bumper, wings, wheels, and body kits befitting of a TXR title.
There’s no HUD or audio in these gameplay recordings, so everything feels a little sparse at the moment. Then again, if you strip TXR’s bangin’ soundtrack and graphic design from the older games, they, too, probably would’ve come across as a little barren. I do appreciate the way brake lights glow and bounce off adjacent body panels and barriers as well as the road surface. These are the little flourishes that Genki could never have managed on, say, the Sega Dreamcast.
One element that does look a little strange and I am prepared to judge now is the game’s chase camera; it seems both rigid and loosely unresponsive in a way that wasn’t true of the older installments, and probably wouldn’t be helpful when snaking through those tight Shuto on- and off-ramps, not to mention all those non-civilian drones. There’s a hint of rear-end sway when cars oversteer, almost like the camera snaps out of strictly tracking the rear of the car in these moments. Chase cams in racing games are a matter of preference of course, but one that switches its behavior haphazardly probably won’t make anyone happy. Genki may still be tuning that, though, and perhaps it’ll even allow players to adjust the multiple views to suit themselves. It also remains to be seen if the game includes a cockpit camera.
All that said, I’m pumped for Tokyo Xtreme Racer. Not only has it been gone for far too long, but there just aren’t games out there like it anymore. Assetto Corsa mods have been a decent stand-in for some fans, but nothing has quite scratched the retro, JDM street racing-focused arcade racer itch quite like TXR used to, which is why I played through the second game in its entirety last year. I had a blast, and the anticipation for this reboot is making me want to revisit it again.
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