PolyRace may seem like a deceptively basic and easy racing game at first glance, but it provides enough variety to be able to play though and try for the best times while not trying to crash and burn. After starting the game up and customizing the controls to my liking, I fired up a training mission to get a feel for the overall game. With a fresh game, the player is limited in their options for choosing hover-cars, difficulty, and track type. As one progresses though Missions, those will unlock, which gives decent variety for running through races.
One of the big things that I noticed that can make things interesting is how race courses are seed generated. For people that aren’t familiar with seed generation, for this game it’s a six character set that is used as the basis for generating every race course. In this case, two letters, two digits, and two letters are used for generation, thus keeping variables limited, but not to the point of where courses are repetitive on play-through at least. With choices of desert, Arctic, and continental terrain types, courses are filled with valleys, hills, mountains, cures, straight lines, and obstacles like trees and rocks to avoid. Taking a note from the F-Zero series, the hover-car has a shield which limits how much punishment it can take at one go. Thankfully, it automatically regenerates after a time of not taking any damage, but something like a head-on collision with a mountain will make the hover-car crash and burn.
