Remember the olden days of really shoddy celebrity-endorsed video games? Not every single one was bad (Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. was solid), but the trend of slapping any random joe on a game box and calling it a day is long behind us...or so we thought. NASCAR legend Tony Stewart has gotten the last laugh on celebrity endorsements.
Just last week, Tony Stewart's Sprint Car Racing released digitally for Xbox One and PS4 -a PC version is still in the works-. For just $29.99, you can get such things as 3 racing series, a "deep" career, 25-player online multiplayer, split-screen racing, 24 dirt tracks, car/driver personalization, and the official seal of Tony Stewart's approval. Look at all of those endorsements on the official website!
I'm mostly dumbstruck that a game like this exists. I was getting used to the fact that movie tie-in games and crappy celebrity products were a thing of the past. Sometimes developers struck gold (and I'll never fault a dev for taking work where they can), but it was a pretty rare occurrence. Considering the stealth nature of Tony Stewart's release, I'm taking it that this one isn't good.
The budget pricing is at least appreciated. There's something to be said of how the triple-A space completely obliterated differing price points until more recently. Not everything needs to be a full $60. I'd even contest that most releases from the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, and EA should even be $10 at launch.
None of that is likely to make Sprint Car Racing a wise investment. That 25-player online mode is probably for the amount of people that will buy this. It would be a mistake to not have cross-play, but then that feature isn't present. My deepest condolences to those of you trying to get online achievements.
In all seriousness, this doesn't seem like the worst game around. When the likes of Forza and Gran Turismo are putting out middling entries with tons of DLC, I'll take smaller-scale projects like this. Maybe it's not "next-generation" or anything, but it hearkens back to a day when racing games didn't need to be about tons of content and a bunch of bloat.
Source: YouTube