The last time we saw of Screamer was a gameplay trailer, which we describe as “lukewarm.”
Fortunately, hands-on reports of the upcoming racing game by Milestone, reviving a long-dormant IP into a cyberpunkish arcade racer with some dashes of anime, has been positive. The devs are actually cooking.
According to content creator GameRiot and media outlet IGN, Screamer boasts right-stick drifting. Instead of a brake-to-drift mechanic employed by many arcade racers, you have to swing the right stick to let the rear-end of the car loose. It’s more or less similar to Inertial Drift, the first game to employ the revolutionary mechanic of making quarter-to-half revolutions around corners.
Another interesting mechanic of Screamer is that cars have semi-automatic transmission, and you’re incentivised to manually shift up at the right time. You can ignore and drive normally, letting the car automatically shift up in gearing, but doing it manually at the right time (there’s a graphical prompt to the timing) gives you meter. Both GameRiot and IGN described it similar to Gears Of War’s active reload system, where you press the reload at the right time for bonuses.
Screamer has two different meters “inspired by fighting games.”
One meter passively fills up, and fills up faster with actions like drifting and nailing those upshifts. This meter, on the left of the screen, has three notches which can be used to boost or put on a shield.
Boosting also has a mechanic, press, hold and let go of the Boost button at the right time to boost longer.
The right meter fills up by spending the left gauge on Boost and Shields. This meter can be used on Strike (Stronger boost where you can, in Burnout terms, takedown an opponent when hitting them in this state) and Overdrive, (indefinite, strongest boost that can takedown opponents, but it’s gone when you crash).
In Street Fighter 6 terms, Screamer has a Drive Gauge where you can Drive Rush and Drive Parry. It also has a Super meter for a Super Art and a Critical Art. Though unlike SF6, there’s no penalty for overspending the Drive Gauge (you won’t get into a Burnout state) and the Drive Gauge here drives up the Super meter.
Plenty of fighting games feature this two-meter management mechanic, but we picked Street Fighter 6 in this analogy due to the appropriate name of the Drive Gauge.
Funny how fighting game mechanics have inspired by racing games. Though Screamer isn’t the first to share this fighting-racing game DNA. Car combat and mortal combat are not too dissimilar, it seems. And these intricacies in mechanics may be what arcade racers need. Though a bump in the sense of speed is still sorely needed to really sell the game on visual impressions.
The new Screamer has no release date yet, but it is targeting a 2026 release.