Epic has revealed Rocket Racing, a new racing game from Psyonix that will be part of Fortnite.
As reported by Dexerto, Epic gave this description of the game:
“Rocket Racing is a supersonic arcade racer where players drift, fly, and boost with friends through an ever-growing selection of tracks.”
Psyonix, of course, is the developer of Rocket League, and that game is still very much alive and remains in active development. So Rocket Racing can’t just be another version of Rocket League in Fortnite. Epic should have made arrangements to integrate Rocket League into Fortnite if that was their goal.
Instead, what this sounds like is a very casual racing game, which takes a lot of the elements found in Rocket League, and puts it in the service of a conventional racer. We’re just going to fall short of calling it an arcade racer, though it does look like that, because not all casual racing games have the characteristics of arcade racers.
Looking at gameplay provides a look at the somewhat strange scenario set up for Rocket Racing to fit in the Fortnite library. Your playable characters do not appear as drivers, but rather, they cling onto the roofs of the cars they are racing on. This allows your character to motion one handed emotes to each other in the middle of races. At the end of a race, the characters go get sucked up by those giant Fortnite vortexes, presumably to later jump onto races again.
On one level, it looks strange, but if you think about it, it also disqualifies that you would be able to play this game on first person perspective. Outside of that, gameplay does seem reminiscent of the more unrealistic casual racers, like Mario Kart 8 or Hot Wheels Unleashed. But the vehicular jumping physics are definitely more reminiscent of Rocket League than anything else.
Above anything else, Rocket Racing just seems like an excuse for Fortnite players to go jump into races sometimes. It certainly feels like there could be more that could be done with this idea. For example, what about a pseudo-battle royale mode where players who don’t reach a checkpoint in time are bumped off of the race, until one racer remains.
Or they could make a different battle royale racing ruleset, with the lose condition being whoever doesn’t reach a certain minimum top speed with each checkpoint. To be fair, we don’t know all the details of Rocket Racing yet, but we will as soon as its launch date on December 8, 2023. You can watch the official trailer below.
