Screamer is a new arcade racer from Milestone, who are known for the Ride and Hot Wheels Unleashed series. It’s a revitalisation of the old arcade racer series Screamer, which hasn’t been seen in over two decades. However, Milestone aims to bring it back with a bold new look, high-octane mechanics, and a robust, multi-layered story mode.
Screamer is an extremely exciting racing title, with a focus not just on going fast but also on making a team racing game about more than just coming in first, thanks to its car-battling systems. Keep on reading our spoiler-free review to see if you’d want to pick up Screamer for a fast and furious ride.
Initial D-lightful
Screamer shoves you straight into its unique selling point: The Tournament, a mission-based story mode filled with character. Specifically, it launches you straight into its very own anime opening, perfectly setting the tone of Screamer for what it is – a racing anime where you get to play as most of the cast.
The set-up for the Screamer’s Tournament arc is that the mother of all street race tournaments has been set up in the cyberpunk-styled city of Neo Rey. The mysterious benefactor, Mr. A, has put up a ludicrously large amount of money to bring in the five playable teams, who have all signed up for their own purposes.
It’s the perfect nexus for overlapping conflicts, relationships, and revelations, split across the necessary main missions and the optional side missions that really allow the characters to open up and grow over its surprisingly large number of story events. Each little mission comes with another bit of story and increasingly difficult challenges.
The story is told through a mixture of fully animated and more standard visual novel-style cutscenes, all fully voice-acted. Through the power of an auto-translating technology, most characters don’t even have to speak English, giving a fun texture to even the simplest character interaction.
At the core of the tournament is a new technology – the ECHO – which allows Screamer to really flex its more interesting mechanics. Screamer really is something between an arcade racer and a kart racer, as the ECHO gives the perfect story excuse to take intense street racing and then add in extra mechanical layers.
The ECHO doesn’t just prevent dying on the track – encouraging you not to worry too much about hitting a wall at high speeds – it also introduces Screamer’s fun central mechanics of Sync and Entropy.
Death Race 20XX
Sync builds up naturally over time, but grows faster if you change gears at the right moment or maintain your top speed for a long time. You can then spend this Sync to get an at-will boost, with its own little timing mini-game to turn it into a more powerful perfect boost.
As you spend Sync, you can build up Entropy – which is used entirely to activate a strike, jolting your car forward with the potential to destroy an opposing racer if you come into contact. It can also be spent on going into overdrive – blasting forward with destructive force, but making it so any driving mistake will end up with you getting destroyed instead.
Taking out an opponent’s car doesn’t just force them to respawn and lose some of their Sync; it also means you get a whole lot of Sync restored instantly. It’s a wonderful loop that encourages you to keep playing fast and aggressively, turning every moment into a tactical choice.
Sync can also be spent to create a shield to protect you from other racers, letting you choose how much you want to risk, leaving yourself open to attacks if you pump all of your Sync into boosting rather than holding anything back.
When you’re playing a team race, it’s not all about coming first; you’ll also pick up points for taking out other drivers, meaning a particularly violent driver might bridge the difference through first and second on take-downs alone.
Different racers are suited to different playstyles – with different top speeds and handling, but also with their own special abilities. Some will lean into the racing aspect, with Hiroshi receiving extra mini-boosts after activating a main boost. Others push hard into the aggression, like Dirk’s ability to easily chain successful strikes against other racers.
Screamer’s not quite done creating fun, though, as even drifting is special. Screamer uses a twin-stick control system, where the left stick on your controller controls the direction you’re moving, but the right stick is dedicated to drifting.
It really takes some getting used to, but eventually I went from slamming into the corners every time to actually feeling like I had control. Once all of Screamer’s mechanics start working together – start syncing – it feels like an orchestra in perfect harmony.
Race your way
Screamer’s story and mechanics are perfectly supported by the game’s cyberpunk-styled presentation. Each character has their own theme that hits with huge amounts of energy, getting you in just the right feeling for a street race, which, when combined with the pulse-pounding sounds of the cars, sucks you in to become one with your racer.
The cyberpunk aesthetic extends to the tracks – the neon-soaked streets of Neo Rey or the devastated badlands of the desert – and the cars, which feel familiar yet futuristic.
You’ll unlock new characters, tracks, and car customisation options by playing through the Tournament, but if story isn’t your thing, Screamer is happy for you to just get on with racing and unlock things that way.
A lot of Screamer is focused on customisation and catering to how you want to play. The Tournament’s difficulty doesn’t just change the racer AI, but also affects time trial and checkpoint targets.
When you’re just racing, Screamer adds some impressive options to cater to your playstyle. You can adjust numbers and turn whole mechanics off, allowing you to create a toolbox to have a great time.
It gives plenty of opportunity to practice with different mechanics outside of the Tournament, and with this many systems piled on top of each other, you just know that the high skill ceiling is going to create some truly impressive displays by experienced racers.
Screamer hits all the right notes to really sing as a fun and frantic arcade racer. It gives you granular levels of control over how you play. The Tournament is a fantastic time, not just as a story, but also as a prolonged tutorial, letting you get used to each mechanic at the right pace before starting to master the next one.
I want Screamer to take the world by storm, if only because I’m going to need people to race against as I keep on playing.
FAQs
Screamer is a new arcade racer from Milestone S.r.l. It’s also a car battler, as races are just as much about fighting your opponents as they are getting ahead of them.
Screamer lets you play in its Tournament story mode, its local Arcade mode, or in online multiplayer. Outside of normal races and team races, there are also time attack modes, checkpoint challenges, score challenges, and an overdrive challenge.
Yes, you can play split-screen up to four players in offline game modes.
Screamer releases on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on March 26, 2026.
