Simple and easy are very different things, no matter how it may look from the outside. Anyone can dip a brush into paint and drag it across a canvas, but creating a painting to be proud of takes skill honed by an incredible amount of practice. Most art is the act of turning a simple idea into a complicated expression, and while the end result usually says more than “look at me go!”, racing is a notable exception. Each track is its own new challenge for the racer to apply their skill and style to in an attempt to paint the perfect line from start to finish, and few racers do a better job of showing this thanPhantom Spark.
A Steady Pursuit of Racing Perfection
The world ofPhantom Sparkis broken up into three domains, each overseen by a champion who is always up for a new challenge in their time-trial races. As a new spark you’re taken under the wing of the teacher Fwinti, who’s easygoing nature makes her the best to introduce the racing basics. Granted, the basics are basic in that you’re piloting a hovering speedster with accelerate, brake and steer as the full set of controls. No turbo-boost, no power slide, no bells, no whistles. If you want to take the top spot there’s only one way to do it and no tricks at all to make it easier, by mastering speed and momentum through the curves of each course.
Three Tracks of Time Trial Bliss in Phantom Spark Demo
Phantom Spark is a time-trial racer featuring hover-vehicles like in Wipeout but a racing challenge more similar to Trackmania.
For the most part, those courses are generous in their curves and obstacles. The tracks are wide enough that hitting a wall is only a problem on the longer or sharper curves, and the course design gives plenty of warning for the rare bottleneck or pillar. The goal of the tracks isn’t to trick the player but rather have them perform the best they possibly can, and while later courses can get twisty and gravity-agnostic, the path always feels fair for the vehicle handling. Granted, course features like grass that slows the ship down, waterways that provide a speed boost, and mud-like sections that make for looser steering require a little planning to handle properly, but the races are short enough that it’s not hard to memorize and adjust during the number of replays it will take to earn a silver.
This ranking/medal system is wherePhantom Sparkstarts to show its teeth. Kind and forgiving are very different things, and if you want a silver rank the tracks have little forgiveness in them. The generosity of the wider courses doesn’t matter a bit when you need to maintain the best possible line to preserve momentum, sacrificing as little speed as possible in just the right spot to avoid the heartbreak of scraping a wall. The ship’s thrust gets the race off to a good start, but boost pads and downhill sections add to it and don’t wear off until you let go of the accelerator. Top speed can be ludicrously fast if you’re able to hold on to it, and maintaining that velocity is going to be necessary to push past silver and earn even a single gold ranking on any of the races.
The Ghost Racers Are Technically Friends
Thankfully,Phantom Sparkis as willing to teach its techniques as it is to require them to post a decent time. While all the races are start-to-finish time trials, each one has a number of ghosts to compete against that, if you pay attention, will show new approaches to the curves and jumps that can shave seconds off the course time. The first race on unlocking a new track is all by yourself, no ghosts or other pressure than to see the track and get a feel for its curves, but it’s not properly unlocked until you’ve played it a second time and beaten the course champion. This can be either easy or brutally hard, depending on how well that first run went, but there’s always room for improvement and the game actively wants to show you how.
Once a track is unlocked the champion will come back with a better time and challenge you again, but taking them on again is optional. The real challenger is yourself, because the ghost of your best run is always going to be there to show how much better you played last time while making it look easy. Just because you know you sweated blood to ride the line doesn’t mean there isn’t a better one, and a victory measured by hundreds or even thousandths of a second is still a win. Each ofPhantom Spark’s thirty courses is its own quest, and it can take dozens of instant restarts to post a run worth finishing to create that newer, tougher ghost.
Closing Comments:
Phantom Sparkis a phenomenally-replayable time-trial racer with a chilled vibe that perfectly complements the try, try, try again nature of the quest for a better run. Its challenge isn’t from brutal enemies or overly-complicated tracks, but rather how it eases the player into the quest for perfection, making the perfect run seem achievable no matter how many seconds need to be shaved off the clock. Granted, the world-building and characters are let down by a lack of any real ending, at least one that I’ve found after clearing all tracks and going back to improve the top times, but it’s so easy to dip into and out of for a quick game that it’s hard to hold that too much against it. The feel of the racing, with its near-perfect controls, eases the quest for mastery, while the leaderboards for each track show that there’s always a way to do better. The simplicity ofPhantom Spark’s controls and short, easily-memorizable courses are a welcoming on-ramp for a beast of a racer, where the need for a better time eventually reveals a skill-ceiling that’s far higher than it’s got any right to be.
Phantom Spark
Version Reviewed: PC
Race to get better. Race for self-improvement. Race to understand how knocking a few hundredths of a second off a best time can feel like victory.
