Review of Retronika: An Enjoyable Ride

Retronika: Initial Impressions – A Work in Progress

Retronika is a puzzling experience. It’s not so much about having a slew of bad design elements; rather, in its current early access form, the game requires significant tweaking and rebalancing before it can earn a solid recommendation.

The initial trailer sparked considerable excitement, carrying over right up to that first moment of starting the game many months later. The premise sounded thrilling: a virtual reality single-player racing action game where you pilot a hoverbike, dodging and weaving through obstacles while using laser guns to fend off adversaries. As an alien trapped on Earth by a freak wormhole incident, your mission is to navigate this futuristic world populated by a flurry of flying cars and make your way back home.

The game is ambitious, and the Dutch creators at 4Players-Studio seem to understand how crucial it is to ease players into its setting. The controls aim for a realistic motorbike experience with an airborne twist. You hold your VR controllers out like handlebars, and tilting the sticks forward speeds you up while pulling them back brings you to a stop.

When you hold on with just one hand, your maneuvering is limited to side-to-side action, but grasping both handlebars offers full vertical control. You’ll duck under or climb over flying cars by pushing or pulling the handlebars. While initially challenging, the game smartly limits early missions to horizontal steering to help you acclimate. It’s only after you get the hang of things that your full movement capabilities—and eventually the use of weaponry—are introduced.

Your firearms automatically equip themselves to any free hand, allowing you to fire at enemy drones obstructing your path. The goal is to conquer straight-line challenges on a 3×3 grid filled with other flying vehicles. Whether it’s eradicating drones or reaching a finish line before time’s up, each mission presents its own unique thrill.

Starting off, Retronika leaves a strong impression. Visually, it’s quite the spectacle in VR, favoring a cel-shaded style that breathes life into the cityscape. You’re constantly surrounded by bustling traffic; high-speed trains zip past, and massive skyscrapers loom overhead, stretching far beyond your lofty cruising height. Initially, the tracks are open enough that you can enjoy the environment and fantasize about the lives of those unseen commuters around you—it’s a lovely escape into another world.

But soon enough, this enjoyment gives way to irritation. Your health bar is limited and erodes not just when enemy drones fire at you but even when you graze other vehicles or fire your own weapon. Drift outside the narrow 3×3 grid, and you’ll see your health plummet until you’re back on track, often losing up to half your vitality in the process.

Retronika struggles with balance. While it’s impressive to have such vibrant surroundings, the sheer number of cars often clogs your path like a traffic jam. When up to 9 vehicles flood your 3×3 grid, navigating through can feel like weaving through peak-hour congestion. Theoretically, it’s all about reaction time and finding gaps, but vehicles tend to make sudden, unpredictable movements, causing unnecessary collisions and pushing you out of bounds.

The drones are an even tougher challenge. They tail you, quickly launching attacks often before you can react. Their relentless accuracy means you usually take some hits, and your own weapons seem too slow or weak to fend them off effectively without losing health. To defend yourself fully, you’d need to stop entirely, relinquishing the handlebars to shoot with both hands, which only leaves you vulnerable to reckless cars and precise drone attacks.

Face more than one drone, and emerging unscathed is near impossible. The more robust white drones complicate things further, turning success into a coin toss. Whether you pull through feels more like a stroke of luck rather than skill. Levels often drag on, and failing forces you to replay lengthy sections, quickly turning excitement into a grueling repeat of the same arduous challenges.

Upgrade options, intended to empower your journey, come through bike and weapon enhancements using in-game currency from completed levels. However, these upgrades—whether it’s improving braking, speed, or handling—are expensive and their effects minimal unless you pile on enhancements all at once. Surprisingly, the areas crying out for improvement, like health or defense, remain untouched by upgrades until far into the game.

Even when they’re available, the cost is steep. Earning the means to upgrade without replaying levels over and over becomes almost impossible and drains much of the enjoyment out of progress. Revisiting Retronika for this review often felt more duty-bound than uplifting, a stark contrast to those first enthusiastic moments.

Final Thoughts on Retronika

Retronika isn’t a lost cause. It’s still early access, with solid foundations: sharp visuals, immersive driving, and a range of 50 missions loaded with diverse weapons. Tackling the game’s imbalance could make a world of difference. Introducing difficulty levels is a start, but sincere attention is needed toward vehicle behavior, drone precision, health restoration, and defense mechanisms regardless of chosen difficulty. Currently, Retronika shifts from pleasant to purely punishing—a frustrating transition after only a few missions.

Could these issues be resolved? The developers mentioned on their Discord channel that the game nears its full release phase, suggesting minimal further balance amendments. Hopefully, that isn’t the case. There’s definite fun potential here, and no one’s asking for a total overhaul; just comprehensive adjustments to bring the game to its full entertaining potential.

Adventure and the charm of a hoverbike escapade through a vibrant city await, but right now, the fun factor just doesn’t quite match up. What a shame.