itch.io

Hi! Thanks for the game :) Here are my thoughts about it

Overall, as it has been stated, controls are a real issue. You asked what to do, I'd suggest implementing controller mapping first because it would fit really well, or check racing game to see what mapping they use. Always use references !

So yeah controls felt pretty terrible, and they were not helped by the camera and level design. It's hard to see where you're going since the camera is always focused on the car and the road is tight, at least for a beginning map, so you have to really improvise when turning left or right, and most of the time it will just not work. The arrows next to the road are, in my opinion, pretty much useless as in racing game, they're either shown in first person view because it's obviously harder to see the road, either to warn the player about a huge bend, which is more the case here, but they're definitely not shown with enough size or particles to put the emphasis on them. So I most of the time ended up colliding the arrows, which made me being soooooooo slow for long seconds, before getting back on the road. Or I ended up in the water and I was excepting it to make me respawn on the road just where I was, but no, I was teleported to the beginning, which felt frustrating.

The game also felt a bit boring because the AI just run away at the start, and at the first misplay, you just completely lose them and you end up being alone on the road. It's okay in a racing game to do mistakes, but what is fun is that you're playing against other car, colliding them, etc. being alone in such a game is very boring. And that's a shame because colliding other cars and speeding up is well made and fun ! So I wish the game helped me doing it a bit more :)
So maybe work on smaller maps, with AI cars being of different speeds, and what you can also do is slow them while they are far from the player, to help him reach them and feel like he can still do it. AI in games do not have to be realistic, they have to SEEM realistic, and you can tweak them in such ways to help the player.

About the art style, I'm not a huge fan of bloom for pixel art games, and it does not fit the day map in my opinion. Looks better during night but still, not really accurate I think. Otherwise this is good looking, everything's clear and the menu looks good though the texts are tilted a bit too much :p

And I think that's it ! I'd play again if you work on some improvements, and also keep in mind that racing games are not the games I play the most so maybe some of my feedback are not so valuable :p but those are my thoughts ! Still, congrats for making a working and polished game during this week !