Game intel
SCREAMER
High-octane action and anime aesthetics collide in this arcade racing game, featuring fighting mechanics and a storyline that hits hard. In this world, some ra…
I went into SCREAMER with a weird mix of nostalgia and suspicion. Nostalgia, because I remember the Screamer logo from dusty PC mags next to Ridge Racer, and suspicion because “arcade racer with a story and combat” is the kind of phrase that sets off alarm bells. I played it on the last morning of Gamescom, running on a PS5 station with a DualSense, caffeine still doing cartwheels thanks to Milestone’s lifesaving espresso. By the end of that session, my thumbs were doing different cartwheels-because SCREAMER asks you to drift with the right stick, and that single decision changes how the whole game feels.
The pitch is loud and clear the moment the first neon skyline floods the screen: dystopian anime world, clandestine tournament, larger-than-life crews with leader characters and their own driving quirks. Think slick, high-contrast futurism with sharp silhouettes and magenta highlights everywhere. But the personality isn’t just in the vibe-it’s baked into the mechanics in a way that punched through my skepticism about 15 minutes in.
My first race was rough. Muscle memory said, “Tap handbrake, turn in, countersteer.” SCREAMER said, “Use the right stick, genius.” The result was a symphony of missed apexes and frantic thumb flicks. You move the right stick to initiate and manage a drift, and it’s not a tacked-on gimmick: your angle and timing matter, and you can even flick mini-drifts on straights to charge your meters. The first lap, I over-rotated into the wall on a tight hairpin because I instinctively tried to brake-drift. Second lap, I tried to feather the right stick and my car slid perfectly parallel with a shimmering guardrail, sparks kissing the side panel, and I thought, okay, there’s something here.
Part of why the right-stick drift works is because it plugs into the game’s dual-gauge system. SCREAMER gives you two meters at the top of the screen: a “super” gauge and an “entropy” gauge. The super fills when you drift cleanly and when you nail your upshifts with a timing prompt. Hit it at the right moment-there’s a visual cue—and you get a noticeable burst. Miss it and you feel a slight sag. That engagement turns even straightaways into little decisions: do I tap a micro-drift to keep that super climbing, or play it safe for the next corner?
Once the super gauge fills, you’ve got options: fire nitro (with a quick QTE-like confirmation to get the most out of it) or pop a shield to survive the car-on-car brawls. The entropy gauge is your blunt instrument: spend it to ram someone into a KO and watch them ghost out and respawn a few beats later. The evil twist is that entropy fills in relation to how you’re using your super, so you’re always balancing offense and utility.
Here’s the moment it clicked for me. Third race, final lap, night city course with an elevated S-bend that drops into a long straight guarded by billboards. I had second place in my sights. I’d been flicking tiny right-stick drifts on the straight to keep super healthy, shifting on the visual cue for that little injection every gear. I banked enough super to shield up through the S-bend, avoiding a pincer move, then watched entropy tick over. As the straight opened, I tucked into the slipstream, waited a heartbeat, then hit the entropy attack and punted the leader just as I triggered nitro. They ghosted, I rocketed. It felt like a tactical combo in a fighting game—two meters, one window, punish confirmed.
Not every attempt is clean. I tried the same thing on the next race and smacked the wall mid-overdrive, which is SCREAMER’s blended state that amps your car into a rolling battering ram. If you so much as kiss the barrier in overdrive, you’re losing all that momentum and looking like a clown. The risk-reward is spicy in a way that’s going to tilt some folks and delight others.
By the end of my first session—call it 45-50 minutes, five races total—I’d climbed from finishing dead last to snagging a comfortable second, with a legit chance at first if I hadn’t greedily over-rotated heading into a late hairpin. The learning curve feels honest: the handling initially seems a touch rigid if you treat it like a traditional arcade racer, but once the right-stick drift becomes muscle memory, the car wakes up. You use the stick to set the slide, use the left stick to hold your line, tap the throttle to maintain angle, then watch your gauges and decide if you’re going to play police bumper or play defense.
Character choice matters in subtle ways, too. The crews—like the Green Reapers (ex-mercs out for blood) or the Strike Force Romanda (ex-pop idols turned speed fiends)—have leaders with distinct affinities. One leader I tried made building super easier but demanded more precise timing to get top value; another leaned into harder-hitting entropy attacks but took longer to charge. I gravitated toward the more forgiving build while I was still calibrating my thumbs, then switched to a more aggressive kit once I could reliably land the shift timing. That little curve of “pick a kid’s bike, ditch it for a BMX” is smart design.
Let’s talk raw driving. SCREAMER feels fast in a way that’s not just numbers. The field of view breathes as you hit nitro, the roadside clutter streaks satisfyingly, and the audio ramps from a throaty growl into a high, desperate whine under load. Quick flicks of the right stick adjust slip angle mid-drift—light touches, not big heaves—and when you’re lined up on a long straight after a clean S, the car has that locked-in magnet feel that all good arcade racers nail. It’s not simmy; it’s intentional, readable, and a little exaggerated, which is perfect for what the combat and meter systems need.
Track design in the demo felt well-considered. I ran a handful of courses, and the common thread was “long straights into character-defining corners.” You get stretches where you can focus on building super via micro-drifts and perfect upshifts, then a signature turn that tests whether you’ve got the right-stick timing down. Elevated sections with guardrails encourage aggression (entropy rams are safer when there’s no cliff to fly off), while wide sweepers let you experiment with angle and line. Visually, the courses lean hard into the dystopian anime aesthetic: towering ads, industrial guts, neon veins, and the occasional rain-slick surface reflecting the city glow. It’s stylish without stranding readability; I never felt like I was guessing where the road went, even when the color palette was shouting.
Vehicular brawling in racers can feel like coin flips. In SCREAMER, the meter economy gives it a brain. You’re often choosing between shielding through a rough sector or saving that super for a nitro burst, knowing that it’ll cascade into your entropy timing later. The entropy ram itself feels satisfyingly weighty—there’s a little lurch and a hard camera kiss when it lands—but it isn’t a win button. Opponents respawn quickly, and ramming at the wrong moment can slingshot someone else past both of you.
I had one messy moment on an urban track where I chased a rival into a narrow underpass. I had entropy, they had shield. I went for the hit anyway (greed is undefeated), bounced off, and opened the door for two cars I hadn’t even clocked to shoot through. That’s the other piece: situational awareness matters. SCREAMER’s UI is clean—two gauges up top, clear prompts for shift and nitro timing—and the minimap gives you enough info to make a call. But there’s a learning curve to reading the room and not getting blinded by the nearest target. I like that about it. It rewards players who can zoom in and zoom out mentally while moving at absurd speed.
I only saw slices of the narrative framing, but the tone is confident: clandestine tournament in a corrupted city, rival crews with history, and leaders who feel more like anime protagonists than generic driver avatars. Cutscene snippets are produced by Polygon Pictures, which tells you exactly the flavor they’re going for—slick 3D anime with strong silhouettes. I can’t judge how deeply the story threads into career structure yet, and a racer’s tale lives or dies on whether it motivates play instead of interrupting it. But even in this hands-on, that extra layer of identity helped seal the whole vibe and justify the combat-forward systems. If you’re going to smash cars as a core loop, give me a reason.
The right-stick drift is going to be polarizing. I bounced off it hard for the first two races, then it became the reason I kept playing. It lets you treat the car like a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer once you internalize the movement, and it opens doors for “drift on a straight” meter play that wouldn’t make sense with a traditional handbrake. That said, I’m hoping launch offers flexible remapping for players with different comfort zones. If you’ve spent years binding camera to the right stick, retraining your thumb to live there under pressure might take more than a demo session.
On the DualSense, the haptics added a satisfying rasp when tires bit hard mid-drift, and trigger resistance communicated throttle control clearly. Input response was crisp; when I messed up, I knew it was me, not latency. This feels tuned for controllers first—no surprise—but I’m curious how it’ll translate to wheel setups. Given Milestone’s pedigree with MotoGP and Hot Wheels Unleashed, I’m cautiously optimistic they’ll give options without diluting the identity.
On the PS5 station I played, the frame rate felt locked at 60 for most of my time, with maybe a tiny hitch when all hell broke loose in a tight chicane and three cars tried to occupy the same space-time. Nothing deal-breaking. The visual clarity held, UI remained readable even with effects blasting, and the audio mix kept engine notes forward without burying the prompts you need for timing. For an early hands-on, it felt steady, which matters in a racer that leans on precision inputs for drift angle and shift timing.
If you love old-school drift rhythm—think Ridge Racer’s slide-to-thrive—but want modern systems to chew on, this is squarely in your lane. The right-stick drift rewrites the muscle memory enough to feel fresh, while the dual-gauge economy gives races a tactical spine. If you’re here for sim handling, this isn’t your stop. If you want pure chaos like Split/Second, SCREAMER is more measured—a knife fight with meters rather than a Michael Bay setpiece every 10 seconds. I also see it appealing to folks who dug Hot Wheels Unleashed’s snappy, readable handling and want something with a sharper, grittier tone.
Hands-on chemistry is strong, but some big-picture questions remain. How will the story integrate with progression—are we talking a meaningful campaign with character arcs, or just stylish bumpers between events? How deep does the roster of characters and affinities go, and will leaders create balance headaches in multiplayer? Can the AI push hard without feeling rubber-bandy, especially when combat enters the mix? And, crucially, will the right-stick drift see enough onboarding to keep newcomers from bouncing off in frustration?
Then there’s track variety. I played a small slice, and what I saw worked, but an arcade racer lives on its circuit personality. Give me layouts that reward different meter philosophies: courses where entropy is king because of guardrails and pack density, and others where nitro lines and shields rule because walls bite. If that variety exists across the 20-ish tracks planned at launch, SCREAMER could dodge the “great demo, shallow campaign” trap that snags so many high-concept arcade racers.
SCREAMER surprised me. I showed up assuming a vibe-first racer that might fizzle once the controller hit my palms. What I got was a confident, mechanical idea: drift with the right stick to empower a two-meter economy that constantly asks, “Are you building for burst, building for safety, or lining up the perfect hit?” The sensation of speed and the feel of the car support that idea, the combat has teeth without turning every lap into slapstick, and the presentation ties it all together with an anime-dystopia bow that feels specific rather than generic.
I walked away thinking about how I’d play differently next time—when to feather the drift for super, when to bank entropy for a sector where the pack compresses, which leader to pick for a track heavy on technical turns. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a hands-on. It made me want to iterate, not just spectate.
Is it perfect? Not yet. The right-stick drift will divide people, and the overdrive punish for wall kisses can feel cruel. But there’s intent behind those choices, and the net result is a racer with identity—one that made me relearn habits and rewarded me for it in under an hour. If Milestone lands the campaign integration and nails balance across characters and tracks, SCREAMER could be the 2026 arcade racer to watch.
Early score: 8/10. A distinctive drift/combat hybrid with a sharp aesthetic and a strong mechanical hook. I want more time, more tracks, and a full campaign to test whether the depth keeps climbing, but the foundation is genuinely exciting.
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