Horse Racing 2016

Okay, let’s see how many mean words I can fit into one review. Horse Racing 2016, in terms of game, or any entertainment medium for that matter, is a pile of horseshit. There are no redeeming qualities to it at all and here’s the quick summary.

Premise – there are some bizarre season layouts where you take a horse and compete in 5 races against some ridiculously imbalanced AI. That’s it. But not only is that it, they felt it necessary to drag this shit out for 11 seasons – so 55 races. The last season includes some shitty, pointless show jumping as well – something that wasn’t present during the rest of the game.

Gameplay – As you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of technical stuff you can put in a horse racing game without making it some kind of simulation where you take care of the horse and the better you do at that, the better the horse becomes. There’s none of that, you just pick a horse, start a race and if you fuck up the start, you will lose the race. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have the player repeatedly mash the A button to make the horse go faster is a fucking idiot.

Aside from the A button, you can also use another button to make the horse jump fences, though you need to press this when the fence is a speck on the horizon to time the jump correctly (an even bigger ball ache in the aforementioned show jumping) and you can press another button to whip the horse to make it go faster… or whip it too much to make it stop and lose the race.

Looks – total ass. I’m not even going to be nice about it, the game is so poorly textured, it’s a joke. It looks like it was constructed on a computer from the 80s. Some of the last levels had rain that wasn’t even hitting the ground, it’s so poor.

Music – just no. It would have been better if there was no sound at all rather than the bizarre noise the game makes.

Obscure references to the TV show Lost – I don’t know if it’s different which each ‘new game’ you start and it took me a while to notice but all of the jockey names were a mixture of character names and actors from Lost. And some of them were spelt wrong too. I wasn’t going to start a new game to see if I got a different TV show though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The achievement list comes down to winning the majority of the races. You need to win 50 races total, which is the last achievement I unlocked in the game because most of the races are either unfair and you lose regardless of your start, or you do a sprint race where you horse has the stamina to get to the end and you win regardless as long as you don’t mind having a sore finger from repeatedly smashing the A button over and over again.

Aside from winning and competing in races, there is one other achievement for and I quote, ‘Win Championship in Top Three.’ Winning is race is defined by finishing in the top three so over your 11 seasons, you need to get enough points to be in the top three positions. This isn’t missable as you replay races you did poorly in to get more points. How do you know which races you did poorly in? You don’t because there is no player list that shows your results. At least it wasn’t obvious to me and the menus are so limited so that it’s unlikely I missed it.

Once you’ve done those two things, you’ll be done with a game you wish you never started.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Horse Racing 2016 is just a shit game. There’s nothing else to say about it. If you don’t believe me, you can pay the developers the £7.99 asking price and find out for yourself but it’s better value to saw your own leg off.