Tokyo Xtreme Racer Early Access Review: We Are So Back

I’ll never forget seeing Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 on the Sega Dreamcast for the first time 25 years ago. It was hard not to be mystified by its exquisite car models, more detailed than any I’d seen before, blanketed by the reflections of street lamps sweeping over sheet metal by the hundreds. Or the alluring playground that was Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway system, with its furthest reaches shrouded in darkness. TXR was a different kind of racing game, too repetitive and esoteric to ever receive the critical adoration or commercial success of Gran Turismo or Need for Speed. But for those who “got it,” there simply was nothing else on the same level. Now, 18 years since the last mainline entry in this classic series, TXR is back. Even better, it’s exactly as you remember it.

That is an especially difficult thing to achieve in modern gaming. In the last two decades since Shutokou Battle X—localized in the West as Import Tuner Challenge—was released, this medium has transformed in ways unthinkable back then. Purely single-player experiences have been largely relegated to Triple-A blockbusters with scripts written by film veterans and characters voiced by Troy Baker. Racing is a sport, and like any other sport, you’re expected to want to do it against other people. Who’d ever play FIFA for a story mode? Once online multiplayer really took off, competition boxed out artistry and solitary joy.

But not for Genki. This veteran developer of cult-classic racing games is still here, employing many of the folks who made those Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 mainstays so beloved. With the new Tokyo Xtreme Racer, releasing Thursday on Steam in Early Access, Genki is very much continuing to make the game it wants to make—the game that history has shown only Genki is willing to. The Early Access label means that TXR’s day-one experience won’t be that of a full title; at launch, players will have free rein over 110 miles of Tokyo highway and access to 48 cars. The second number, at least, is expected to grow over time, likely adding more licensed exterior parts and wheels in kind. Genki also plans to introduce new storylines and rival racers between now and the final release, which seems on track for later in the year.

All that said, what’s here is comprehensive. The traditional structure of TXR is already in place: The player can enter the Shuto Expressway from one of many on-ramps, and confront rival racers who tend to frequent particular routes or loops. Swinging behind one and flashing your lights initiates a race, referred to in these games as “SP (Spirit Points) Battles.” Each driver gets a fighting game-style health bar that decreases when they are behind their competitor. The further behind you fall, the faster that bar depletes. Striking traffic or walls deletes chunks of it, too, making finesse as important as speed. And those Japanese highways can get awfully narrow.

Almost every rival you encounter belongs to a crew of about five or more racers. Defeat all the underlings, and the boss will take you on. Some only appear if certain conditions are met, and those could be as simple as beating other teams first, or as arcane as stopping at one of the game’s Parking Areas (the expressway’s rest stops, basically) a certain number of times; having a specific prefecture represented on your license plate; equipping underglow to your ride; or cruising in an unmodified car. Yes—like all the games of your youth, TXR is still as enigmatic as ever.

The difference, at least with this new age of the franchise, is that Genki has learned to be slightly more respectful of players’ time. So now, instead of requiring you to scroll through an immense list of rivals and memorize the routes they run in, the highway map that appears before you leave your garage shows where other racers are on the map. Plus, if you’ve seen them before, it’ll even tell you who they are. You will still need to reference that Pokédex of street racers to complete the game efficiently, mind you, but some of the friction has been smoothed out.

Beat the rivals on your objectives list, and you’ll progress through episodes of the story. New tiers of vehicles, parts, and perks are unlocked with every chapter. These exist in respective skill trees, and as you play the game, you’ll accrue “Battle Points” that are spent on such items. You also earn “Credit Points”—old-fashioned money—from winning races, but those credits can only purchase things that have already been unlocked with Battle Points. The game essentially has two currencies, which makes it a little more complicated than classic TXR.

I’m of two minds about this. First off, I generally don’t like barriers beyond price to buying cars in racing games. Gran Turismo 5 and the original Forza Motorsport both operated this way, and there’s a reason they don’t anymore—it feels needlessly obstructive. But I’m not really concentrating on that too much, because the bigger concern is the parts tree.

See, bosses and lone-wolf “Wanderers” in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series are not to be trifled with. They’re usually much faster than you and, in their difficulty, have always existed as stopgaps to completing these games too quickly. Because of these rivals, the series has earned a totally justified reputation for being grindy. Once you’ve crossed paths with someone who is just that quick standing in the way of your progress, your only recourse is to keep battling the same drivers you’ve already beaten over and over again until you’ve earned enough money to make your existing car significantly faster, or buy a new and much better one.

You can still farm defeated rivals for cash in the new TXR, or—in a series first—challenge regular traffic to impromptu races. They always accept, and they’re pushovers. While they don’t net you much money, they do increase your win streak, which awards bonus cash over the course of a night, so they certainly contribute a wrinkle to the gameplay experience.

All of this is to say that money and Battle Points come easily in TXR. But remember: Car upgrades are locked behind progression. So what do you do if you’ve improved your car as much as possible at a given point in the campaign, but the one boss you have to defeat to progress has 115 more horsepower than you?

You lose many times. That’s what.

In my first 10 hours with the game, I encountered one rival who was frankly invincible, due to their astonishing speed. My last resort was chasing them up the map into the portion of the C1 Loop where lanes of traffic are occasionally divided by pillars. Ideally, they’d fail to negotiate traffic and hit the divider, allowing me to take the lead and hopefully keep it. This was the favorite tactic of first-time TXR players a quarter-century ago, but it never worked here; this opponent could blast so far ahead so quickly that even if they crashed, I’d have lost by the time I caught up. I was ready to pause my playthrough, right then and there.

And then, mercifully, Genki pushed out an update just a few days ago that nerfed this racer by about 120 hp, allowing me to finally beat them and graduate to the next chapter. This is exactly the sort of thing an Early Access period is good for—the chance to identify players’ pain points and adjust. The developers certainly seem to be responding to these issues as quickly as possible, but then I don’t expect every update to make the game easier. Days before this latest one, another patch more than doubled the price of a very competitive car that probably would’ve allowed me to defeat that boss who was giving me so much trouble, putting it out of reach.

Such is the malleable nature of a modern game. If nothing else, this new TXR has the potential to change over time, something its predecessors never could do. For a series known for being unapologetically brutal, I’ll take those odds, especially because that classic Genki charm is still here.

TXR is one of those games that feels like it’s teeming with secrets. From weird dialogue exchanges with quirky adversaries, to encounters and abilities that flip the expected course of gameplay, to a soundtrack built almost entirely of remixes of earworms from 25 years ago, TXR feels lighthearted and unpredictable in a way racing games just don’t anymore. At one point, I faced a rival crew where all the drivers were players on an American football team—just pure genius.

And the fundamentals are strong, too. Handling is predictable and consistent with the older titles. There’s a tendency toward understeer and the steering’s a little dull, but it’s all geared for negotiating traffic at high speeds and delivers on that objective, even if it leaves cars feeling less dynamic than I’d prefer. You might find the pace a little slow at the jump, but if you stick with TXR, the sense of speed becomes blistering as you graduate to quicker equipment. Genki’s implemented a screen-shake effect for the chase cam, but frankly, it’s pretty disorienting at anything above 120 mph. The game doesn’t need it, and I’d like to see an option to either disable or reduce it for comfort.

This brings us to visuals and performance, which I’ve found remarkably stable, especially for an Early Access release. Even now with Unreal Engine 5 running the show, that distinct TXR vibe is still very palpable. Some things haven’t changed, like the stark contrast between the warmly lit highway and the murky urban sea below, or the way shadows flash across bodywork faster and faster as you accelerate. But, of course, UE5’s modern rendering features count for a lot, and while the game is pretty and pretty friendly to more dated hardware at low and medium settings, those who have the headroom to run TXR on the high or ultra preset get to enjoy ray-traced global illumination and reflections.

Tapping into these features, provided by UE5’s Lumen system, fills in all the light between what’s directly lit by streetlamps, and allows everything from tunnel ceilings to rival cars to authentically reflect the world around them in real-time. The game does indeed look stunning this way, but it comes at a high cost. My rig, consisting of a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU, can just about achieve a locked 60 frames per second at 1440p resolution with high settings across the board. Dropping global illumination and reflections to medium—thus disabling those Lumen effects—immediately nets about a 30 fps advantage. For an expert’s insight into TXR’s visual makeup and an understanding of what its many graphical settings actually do, be sure to check out prolific game dev and modder Silent’s recent analysis.

Finally, we have to talk about multiplayer—or, rather, the absence of it. TXR offers no way to race alongside or against your friends at launch, which is a bit jarring in 2025. Genki’s arguably gone too traditionalist in this sense, building a single-player, story-driven arcade racer in this day and age, though I respect the commitment to their vision. That said, the success of Assetto Corsa’s Shutokou Revival Project mod demonstrates that there’s massive demand for a TXR-like experience with a more communal slant, and it’s something Genki absolutely should capitalize on if it expects to grow this game’s appeal beyond loyal fans from back in the day. It doesn’t need to be a fully online-focused thing, either; just let players free-roam the map and challenge each other to impromptu battles.

Theoretically, Genki could add such a feature later on in development, but there’s nothing to show for it right now. And that’s kind of the tradeoff with buying this game during Early Access; it costs just $30, but it isn’t fully polished, and we don’t have a clear sense of how it’ll look a year from now.

Still, what’s already here is as encouraging a start as any old-school TXR fan could hope for. Genki has thoroughly recaptured the spirit and the gameplay of those beloved games, while at the same time thrusting them into the modern age with some quality-of-life considerations and advanced visuals. This is a kind of racing game that simply hasn’t existed for the better part of two decades; it’s not only hard to believe it’s back, but that it’s already representing the finest version of itself. Tokyo Xtreme Racer was very much a product of its time, but so many years later, nostalgia for this golden era of JDM performance has reached new heights, particularly with younger folk who weren’t even alive to appreciate these cars when they were actually in production. In that way, the new TXR is more than a fun, addictive racing game; it’s a time machine.

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