Developer: Yash Future Tech Solutions Publisher: Yash Future Tech Solutions Format: Android, PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One Released: Who cares? Sometime last year on Xbox One, sometime this year on PS4. Copy purchased
Okay, let’s get this absolute piece of crap folded up and put away for good. Horse Racing 2016 is a game that inexplicably found its way not just to the PS4, where such garbage is rapidly gaining a foothold, but the Xbox One as well, where it once held a price tag thrice as high as its current one.
Right now it’s $12.99, yet it barely has any business charging a buck on Google Play. In fact, Horse Racing 2016 is on Android right now and it seems to cost fucking nothing.
Since I think Sony must be high or trashed in order to continue letting digital excreta like this and Life of Black Tiger through the sluice gate, I’ve decided to get as close to fucked up as I can in order to write this review. In doing so, I hope to be struck by some stunning revelation and understand exactly what in the Christing fuck is going through the heads of the “professionals” letting dangerously bad games near the public.
Hopefully the cocktail of deadly things in my bloodstream will open my mind’s eye or something.
There’s something amusing ironic, I think you’ll agree, that the game is called Horse Racing 2016even though it’s rearing its ugly head in 2017. The irony is that the game is a shitheap of a fucking war crime.
I don’t suppose that’s ironic, and that’s the joke of what I just did, subverting the expectation of irony with an unrelated point. You may be wondering why I’m explaining a joke that wasn’t even particularly good to begin with, let alone possessed of high enough quality to survive this level of lingering scrutiny.
There’s a very simple reason for that – fuck this game.
This game doesn’t deserve funny things written about it. Anything that risks being funny in regards to Horse Racing 2016 must be immediately and summarily defaced, similarly to how that bull statue in New York was absolutely fucked after a corporation put a metal girl near it.
(I accidentally typed “Metal Gear” instead of “Metal Girl” at first and now I’m pumped as heckin’ fuck at the idea of a little bronze Metal Gear beating the everloving dogshit out of that bull.)
Do the periods go inside or outside the bracket? We call them brackets in the UK, though I’m in the United States now and I think you call it parenthesis a lot and don’t know what I mean when I say brackets, even though the “(” symbol is a bracket no matter what side of the ocean you’re on, so don’t fucking test me on it.
Anyway, I actually have no fixed opinion about the girl and the bull thing going on down in that wacky ol’ Wall Street. I’ve read a lot of opinions and can’t disagree with many of them so I’m going to ride that fence like a horse.
Speaking of riding a horse, this game is absolute bollocks.
Every race is more or less the same. You tap a button repeatedly to make the horse run and you can press another button to whip it in the side of its face and give it a speed boost. Obviously the horse will become exhausted if you whip it too often, so theoretically it’s a game of balancing your stamina resources and, you know, doing normal horse racing stuff.
Problem is, the game’s governed entirely by a series of completely off-kilter stats. If you have a better horse, you win. That’s the premise.
The entire first season of races will have you lose automatically because your horse is rubbish. When you get to season two and access better horses, you’re suddenly miles ahead of the competition – the horse is faster, the stamina regen is significant, it outclasses everything else – but eventually the game catches up and its own horses start outmatching yours again.
In essence, the gameplay feels absolutely pointless. You progress through seasons no matter where you place. You can come dead last in everything, but so long as you take part you’ll access new seasons of visually bland racetracks and horrendous, badly animated horses.
Some races have things for the horse to jump over. Whatever they’re fucking called in horse terms. Bullshit horse jumps over the bullshit fence.
(Earlier, I mentioned that I was pumped as heckin’ fuck at the idea of a little bronze Metal Gear beating the everloving dogshit out of that bull. First of all, I’m repeating the phrase so the idea becomes less interesting, and second of all I want to point out that I deliberately said dogshit instead of bullshit in a very tawdry play at subversion).
Also I’ve just done a subtle joke where I place the period outside the bracket despite placing a period inside the bracket earlier. That’s a pretty low-key goof that might have gone unnoticed and remained a hidden gem had I not completely shat all over it by drawing everybody’s attention to what I did.
Speaking of which, do you like how I keep explaining why I’m explaining jokes, further running everything into the ground? Good. By grinding my own gags into the concrete and the fucking dirt I can mentally squint just enough to pretend I’m doing it to Horse Racing 2016 instead.
I wish this game had a head so I could stamp on the back of it and push it mercilessly into a pile of sick and guts.
Metacritic can use the above line.
Fucking mosquito season in Mississippi already. Covered in bites from the disgusting little fucks. I’d like to cover Horse Racing 2016 in mosquitos. This is assuming we’re in a scenario where Horse Racing 2016 has anything to fear from parasitic insects, of course. To my knowledge, malaria poses no threat to a videogame of any description.
Travelers. People who are traveling to other countries, they’re the ones who need to worry about malaria.
I apologize for what must seem an odd tangent to suddenly bring up mosquitos but I quite literally paused writing just now to apply more allegra to the furious welts on my arms. Not only do mosquitoes seem to really like me (probably all the sugar and french fries in my veins), I react incredibly badly to them with annually exponential unpleasantness.
As I write this, I’m in a perpetually irritated state as a result of said reactions suddenly kicking off. Ordinarily I’d consider myself in a bad frame of mind for a review, but this feeling is quite similar to the sense of desperate clawing misery I experienced with this sad fuck of a game.
I wish this game had a dick, so I could very specifically hate its dick.
Love,
Jim Sterling.
P.S. I’m no closer to figuring out how these games keep happening.
1/10 Accursed
