Retronika feels like a love letter that missed its mark. It’s not that the game is inherently flawed by design; rather, in its present early access form, it requires a significant amount of fine-tuning and balancing before it can fully earn a recommendation.
The initial allure of Retronika was undeniable, driven by an enticing trailer. The concept is a real draw: a VR single-player racing action experience where you’re at the helm of a hoverbike, maneuvering through a world of hovering vehicles using laser guns to fend off foes. You play as an alien, accidentally sucked through a wormhole, trying to get back home from a futuristic, car-laden Earth.
Ambition fuels this game, yet 4Players-Studio, the Netherlands-based developers, have shown an understanding of a gradual learning curve, smartly easing players into the game. The controls aim to simulate a real motorbike feel, with the added thrill of defying gravity. With your hands on the virtual handlebars, the acceleration and deceleration are controlled via the analog sticks—push forward to speed up, pull back to slow down.
Navigating with one hand stuck to the horizontal plane eventually gives way to more complexity when both hands are on the handlebars, unlocking full vertical movement. This means you can dodge flying cars by simply pushing up or down. It’s tricky at first, but the game smartly limits you to horizontal steering until you’re ready for more freedom. Only after you’ve got the steering down does Retronika throw in the added challenge of using guns.
Your weapons automatically attach to the hand free from handlebars, letting you shoot at drones attempting to disrupt your journey. The goal is straightforward: tackle linear challenges by zipping through a 3×3 grid filled with other vehicles, often surpassing set targets like destroying certain drones or sprinting to a finish within a time cap.
Visually, Retronika wows with its initial presentation. Its VR setting is vibrantly immersive, forgoing hyper-realism for a cel-shaded style that brings the cityscape to life from your racing perspective. While navigating, you’re amidst a lively backdrop of racing cars, zooming trains, skyscrapers piercing the clouds, and rapid delivery speeders slipping from view. These beginning stages are indulgent, allowing you to master the controls and embrace the world’s ambience, cultivating stories of unseen commuters bustling in their own lives.
However, the joy soon declines into exasperation. As each level progresses, a finicky health bar becomes your constant bane, depleting as you brush against enemy drones or vehicles on your track, or even when firing a shot. Wander too far from the narrow grid, and your health plummets until you retreat back into the bounds. Managing this is a tightrope walk; often, you’ll scrape by, clutching onto a mere fraction of your remaining health.
One glaring issue is Retronika’s balance. While it’s commendable to animate your racing environment with bustling activity, the saturation of cars along your path borders on excessive. The 3×3 grid too often resembles rush hour, a lone clear path amid congestion. This would be a welcome challenge were it not for the erratic, unpredictable movement of vehicles, turning finding a safe spot into a frustrating guessing game—one where a sudden swerve spells disaster as you’re bumped out of bounds.
The drones are a different story, often worse. These adversaries pursue aggressively, firing on you before you’re even within range. Countering them with your guns feels futile; their marksmanship rarely errs, and your own arsenal is underwhelmingly slow. Engaging multiple drones means accepting impending damage, and as tougher white drones emerge, survival feels more like luck than skill. The sheer length of levels only compounds this, making failure all the more disheartening as you repeatedly grind through the same segments.
In theory, customization should offer solace. Defeating levels earns you currency to upgrade your hoverbike or weapons, supposedly enhancing capabilities from braking to acceleration. Yet these upgrades impart questionable differences unless stacked together, and they do little to mitigate greater concerns like health and defense—shields, hinted at in trailers, remain tantalizingly locked away till late in the game.
Moreover, the prohibitive cost of these upgrades saps motivation. Earning enough in a simple playthrough is a rarity; instead, you’re coerced into retracing steps, replaying earlier levels to gather the resources needed, which dulls the thrill of discovery.
My current take on Retronika is tempered by its state of early access—a stage ripe with potential. Its driving mechanics are solid, the world is visually enticing, and the breadth of missions and weapons teases variety to revel in, providing the balancing issues are addressed. Difficulty settings ought to be redefined, NPC motions refined, drone precision adjusted, and health mechanics overhauled to ensure an enjoyable experience beyond the initial stages.
The developers have hinted on their Discord that the game’s early access is nearing its end, leaving little hope for radical balance adjustments before full release. I truly hope this isn’t the end of the line for such needed improvements because hiding amidst the frustration is an enthralling adventure waiting to unfurl.
Retronika promised the dream of soaring through a vibrant cityscape on a hoverbike, but the fun is still a little way off—and that’s a genuine pity.
