Tabletop Racing is a broken and unresponsive mess of a game. Needlessly and forcefully using every hardware feature on the Vita while spamming the player with microtransactions, this is one racer that burns out.

The only upside is the graphical presentation, but much in the same that I imagine a 1930s bearded lady freak show is good looking. The game goes out of its way to make everything look smooth and shiny, but everything that it renders is boring and a step and a half away from being considered by most people to be literal garbage. I might understand if this was some kid’s Make-A-Wish dying hope, but I think that even if it was they should have probably focused more on refining the weak and floaty controls than on making sure the ice cream truck look “baller”.

Everything has a glowing effect

Part of the reason the game plays so poorly is because it insists on using all functionality on the Vita. You need to use the touchpad to navigate menus, brushing the back touch panel causes the game to swing in reverse camera mode (so any form of a comfortable grip while play is out), and the network connection is abused for microtransactions in the most comical way. Most of these could be forgiven for a while but the largest issue is the expectation to pay additional money, for an in game currency, to continue to play a terrible game. This appears the moment that you try and go outside of any of the standard racing events as certain cars, which are roughly 10 to 100 times more expensive than any other, are required to even start those events. It just feels insulting to anyone who ending up paying for the game only to be bombarded with microtransactions to take advantage of in-game content.

Remember Micro Machines?

Tabletop Racing is eight dollars on the PlayStation Network with a bevy of other purchasing choices you can pay for if you feel like progressing through the game after the first couple of hours. That means that unless you are going to sink an ungodly amount of time into a boring game to grind out coins so you can unlock a car for a new mode so you can do the same thing again, you are going to pay normal retail price for a game that should have come with cereal as a prize. It is just hard to care for a game as a player when it doesn’t seem like the developers cared about their project.