Had no budget constraints, this would have been a classic. With what Milestone had, it'll carve out a semi-niche fanbase and will be following its racing colleagues in a line: "There was Split/Second, Pure, Ridge Racer, Blur... and Screamer."

It's sweet that people want story in their racers. The animated cutscenes here were simply amazing, no surprise, given the studio behind it delivered some of the most successful animated work for well-known IPs. They're sparse, which is understandable. But events themselves also act as cutscenes (animated or visual-novel-style), and sometimes you genuinely read more than you race. If I recall correctly, there are six events back-to-back where you only read cutscenes. That's overwhelming, and I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping them — I pretty much did so. I'm here for the races, not Doki Doki Drift Club. Sorry, if I must.

But skipping takes away from the context of the races and objectives, which surprised me. This is a narrative-heavy game, and the main tournament events (gold-colored ones) are actually straightforward, often functioning as tutorials. Even by the end, the objectives aren't really about "winning" which I respect. Most of the time it's about surviving a race, knocking out opponents and extracting revenge, or simply learning how your car works when you are introduced to a new character. If you expected a "story" where every event is another race you keep winning, this ain't it.

With a Tekken-like cast where everyone speaks a different language yet understands each other, Screamer is gritty and mature if not overly melodramatic. The PEGI16 rating, if you ever wondered why, is granted when you get that 'aha moment' seeing a man gets crushed under weight and blood is spilled, certainly an unorthodox moment for a racing game. It's essentially a tournament story hosted by a rich, mysterious benefactor, with several factions harboring ulterior motives. There are 21 playable characters (including the tournament hosts).

The campaign stretches to about 15-20 hours, plus split-screen (rare these days), multiplayer, and Arcade mode with six racing disciplines. The price isn't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane, but I'd have preferred a shorter game with a smaller cast for more animated screen time, a $40 price tag would've been too sweet.

Still, there are moments where the story bleeds into the gameplay, and that's a good effort. You won't catch them without watching the cutscenes. There are moments where you think, "Why is this too easy?" and "How the hell do you beat this guy?" Take Hiroshi's nemesis Gabriel, he gets knocked out, and you can easily beat him. Even then it's not a total breeze; you still need to study opponent movesets and race behavior (tbf, they mostly spam overdrive by the end). Then the host himself, he's an unstoppable beast, but as Hiroshi learns more about him, reveals his identity and motives, you understand him and beat him. You could say the devs just nerf and buff opponents according to the story, but it's still cool.

Some races feel mad, though. I haven't played many Milestone games in the last decade beyond the first Hot Wheels. Milestone is known for their bike racers; I quit those long ago, only briefly playing the first RIDE. I hear they're inconsistent, but Milestone releases lots of ♥♥♥♥. There are 13 games between Screamer and fkn Hot Wheels Unleashed — another Hot Wheels, Monster Jam, Monster Energy, annual MotoGP games, SBK (I left it at SBK X, probably one of their best), two more RIDE games. How can anyone keep up? So Screamer for most is just another Milestone game, but anime-styled.

I think Milestone just didn't know how to market this, but it'll get noticed in the long run. Until then, I can't say how bad the rubberbanding is or dive into other racing jargon because I simply didn't run each race dozens of times across difficulties. There were races where I gave up and switched AI difficulty from Medium to Easy (which I tried hard to stick with as the intended difficulty). I even switched tournament difficulty to "Story" from "Balanced Gameplay." The latter I feel worked better although I often noticed the objectives really didn't change. Some races I simply couldn't clear consistently. I'd chalk it up to skill issue, but it wasn't happening on main objectives, the hard parts are mostly side stories. Some races had me stuck for an hour, and I still couldn't tell exactly why. And that's despite all the accessibility and difficulty options.

It can get tough. Admittedly tough, and I'm low-key glad to see a game step away from conventional racers. But I also feel people are acting hard because it just released and if the learning curve is steep so is parsing out inconsistencies in the AI behaviour across dozens of events. Whether intended or not, there are events where the AI aggressively sticks to you and gaps you, and others where you gap them and leave the pack behind. Sometimes you actually need to babysit them as you are required to knock them out so you need to stay behind (and still asked to win the race). And sometimes, you can't even do that because they often place 1st or 2nd and you need to drive aggressively (regularly knocking out the pack to fill your gauge) to catch up. Objectives doesn't always align with how races play out and they feel unintuitive.

One particular frustration was chasing Fermi the corgi. That ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dog is wild. No matter how clean I raced, he always outpaced me with his boost, even on easier difficulties. When I was about to give up, a wise friend suggested ambushing him. It was a circular track with a KO objective. I waited, and as he approached, I knocked him out. It worked. Was it intended? I can't tell. Either way, I'm glad of the outcome.

Most races are about micromanaging your gauges - that comes as natural but may also distract you (particularly trying to read the cues for gear shift). As others have said, once the game clicks (timing the perfect boost, reading attack cues etc), it's a lot of fun. I didn't mind twin-stick driving, and while I can't say it's truly innovative, I wouldn't mind seeing more of it. I thought it would be tiring, but give it a few years and it'll feel second nature.

Character abilities add depth. They fit their personalities. Go into overdrive with your shield off and you risk exploding if you clip a corner. Some are risk-takers and have longer, more aggressive overdrives, while safer chars get conventional buffs like a secondary boost after a perfect boost or larger boost/entropy gauges or even an emergency shield when you get KOed. Hell, one of the chars has a secondary mechanic ''Hype'' which actually rewards drifting and you get a free strike when you 100% the bar. I wish that was the main part of the game.

I haven't played multiplayer, so I can't say how chaotic it gets, but in single-player, corner-bombing isn't easy. There were times I did everything right but was simply out of juice for any gauge, only to get wrecked at the last moment. Annoying as it is, that's probably the "emergent gameplay" beauty of these games. It's easy to think you can always align an opponent for a strike or micromanage gauges to perfection, but beyond a handful of races where I raged and couldn't tell if they were unbalanced or I just wasn't enough, it's usually manageable. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to hear some cars/abilities need balancing with a cast this large, it feels inevitable. That's what most fighting games suffer from.

The aesthetics are charismatic, though I lost some interest when the game stepped outside the bright neon streets. Then it launched me into a spaceship! There's good track variety, but environmentally it's still somewhat sparse.

I hope it'll continue. Milestone finally tried something original, and they might be about to hit it big.

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

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You Guys Loved Chloe So Much, So We Decided to Return Her: The Game
(Also an apology tour because Double Exposure was hated in nation...)

It's a complete oxymoron compared to what the 2015 game accomplished. I can't tell if it's because the story underwent several rewrites or if they felt the pressure of giving closure to Chloe and Max and simply choose the most common denominators for a happy fanbase. Probably a mixture of both.

The gameplay has lost a step from Double Exposure. Hell, it doesn't even have as many interesting bits as True Colors, but I know a lot of folks will forgive that. Long story short: Max, with her regained power to rewind time, does her usual thing from 2015. Double Exposure mechanics are gone. Caledon is smaller. Chloe (your playable dual protag btw) can backtalk and convince people… by selecting the correct options that require the bare minimum of environmental observation.

Then there's Safi. A shapeshifter who's too conveniently a parallel to Chloe, just sort of… there. Still a badly written character, still no real emotional payoff. Deck Nine doesn't even bother letting us play as a shapeshifter and, you know, do interesting things. We get it: she has mommy issues, and like Chloe with her Rachel, she lost someone. ♥♥♥♥ happens, I guess. She's left as an afterthought, much like Diamond from the last game, who has completely vanished. And just like that Safi loses her character hook. So, begs the question, what was the point of Double Exposure besides the completely failed ''murder mystery'' plot? Remove Safi, remove the love interests, remove most of the Caledon. It's completely fine as far as Reunion concerned. That said, romance with Amanda (and Vinh, if you had the stomach) is a foregone conclusion. They conveniently forgot Max's powers, and you know who's back. They definitely pivoted and forgot this was meant to be a sequel to a game people paid for.

All the Abraxas ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is an waste-of-time excuse for more Chloe and Max adventures because they couldn't make a good plot point out of it... unlike, say, Vortex Club. Surprise, surprise.

Chloe and Max never stop reminding us how much they mean to each other, how they wouldn't trade their time together for anything else, how blessed they are to be reunited. Man… all this happened right before I decided to save Arcadia Bay. Why can't I catch a break? The 2015 ending was controversial because a) it was a complete mockery of the choose-your-narrative genre, and b) it somehow worked within that framework anyway. It was a neat ''butterfly effect'' game and didn't really have that need to be anything more than that.

Now? Now we get an ending reminiscent of an FMV tribute to the Life Is Strange 2015 & Before the Storm lineage (they even dared to put Kate and Warren in there despite they are barely recognized much like the rest of the og cast) and some bits from Double Exposure and Reunion as if someone wanted to post it on Youtube. Arcadia Bay is thriving and our sweethearts are back in town! Holy fk what an unasked-for, massive overcorrection that completely undermines DONTNOD.

And yes, this time the final choice is less binary (in a way, it actually is), but does that truly matter? I am not convinced that it is. You, Super Max must stop fires from breaking out at Caledon and killing innocent students. Not a bad premise, but it's kind of hilarious to think a couple of teenagers stopped an unknown storm, Double Exposure teased an even bigger threat, and now we're chasing arsonists. Okay…

Determinant characters are too safe. You can easily tell why people missed who they missed by looking at the global percentages. I couldn't save everyone, but say I did, then Super Max can happily retire. Say I lost one or two and then not-so-super Max can still retire; she's got the one that matters most. Say she lost a bunch and couldn't work things out with Chloe. Eh, we've seen that already.

I'm genuinely glad Chloe and Max rekindled what was lost, and they keep exposing us, the players, how glad they are to be together without giving much else other than, perhaps, a few soap opera cutscenes. But come on for a second, you have a whole cast that simply can't shine the way the original's did. The script keeps telling us what a burden it is to mess with time (and reality, and all that jazz), but I'm not exactly sensing that threat or urgency.

Max is too sweet of a character. It's really hard to take anyone else's side when they have doubts about her (and it's really only Safi lmfao). Yes, she has some selfish tendencies —like every other person on the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ planet— but she's still too perfect of a protagonist. Come to think of it, Max (and by extension, Chloe) is basically the Leon of RE9 anyway. Hell, just like him, they leave on better terms than they started. Not that I mind, but where's the payoff? Where are the stakes? Max can literally briefly blip out of time and reappear. Where did that come from?

Besides, I haven't seen many games like A Plague Tale: Requiem that dare to show what it truly means to let go. If you want me to let go of my obsession with replaying(rewinding) and essentially messing up with time again and again until perfection, then make it part of your gameplay. If you don't, and instead urge players to save everyone to get the "perfect" ending, then congratulations: you've undermined the emotional tone of the original work.
Max's monologue after making a major choice is kept and she's still doubting if she should rewind. Yet, she also knows better of the severity of outcomes that could possibly come into fruition. I am still unsure why Deck9 would refuse to stich the whole rewind mechanic into something grander.

The social media from Double Exposure (was it Crosstalk?) is gone. You may think I'm being too picky but nah, I loved it man. It was a great way to observe the interactions between people and it helped the worldbuilding. And Max would post the photos you take as collectibles. The SMS are kept but they are just more exposition that unfolds the story. Speaking of SMS, poor Chloe didn't hear back from Steph or David... Figures. Merging the timelines is messy, ain't it? Too many plot points to address... ugh.

Putting all the endless exposition and cowardice of the game aside, they did Chloe right. Still witty, still has hilarious lines, still loves science, and hangs out with Moses. She's matured but still has ''that'' edge.

What else? I don't really know. Or rather, I don't think it would matter. If you're here for closure for Chloe and Max: great. More power to you, more power to them. But despite using Caledon for a second time —and not really introducing new places— the game fails to add more depth or mechanics on top of its predecessor. Sometimes the facial animations are off too, weak in expression. Environment & hair textures are somehow worse than DE. It has a diluted gameplay and, of course, diluted narrative by simply refusing to leave its comfort zone.

But it's finally fkn over. Or so they say.

It's bizarre to see a work that continues the "your choices don't matter" trend, not only within the game itself but across the entire franchise. What an innovation with zero catharsis. Not to mention Square, after a decade, still fails to see the literary weight of their western IPs and they simply don't get what works with them. They keep amounting to nothing.

★★½☆☆☆
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Regarding endings:

If Max burns the photo herself after saving everyone Congratulations, you've finished the game 100%, you're amazing.
If Chloe burns the photo The wiser Chloe falls out of favor because she can't make decisions together.
If Max goes back in time again The wiser Max also falls out of favor because she can't learn from her past mistakes.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯