The state of the arcade racing genre in 2026 is fascinating to say the least. Founding fathers Sega and Namco have been on a milk carton, apart from the surprising inclusion of Virtua Racing in the Sega Ages lineup over on Nintendo Switch, or the random Ridge Racer drop on Hamster’s Arcade Archives or the PlayStation Classics line. This has left the genre to a bunch of indie studios that have done a great job paying tribute to those old classics with games like Formula Retro Racing: World Tour, DDI Rally Championship, and most recently, Super Woden: Rally Edge. Tribute and succession are two different things, however, and as fun as a lot of these games can be, there’s a certain noticeable gap between them and the games that inspired them.
It’s a situation I’ve been watching closely over the years, and have spoken on it extensively (here and here are good examples that might even serve as good preliminary viewing to further contextualize this review). The genuine return to prominence of the arcade racing genre is something I greatly hope for, even if the games that are building toward it haven’t actually gotten us there yet. One possible solution, I’ve speculated, is that bringing voices into the development studio from those legendary arcade racing teams of the past could give a project that extra little shot of design perspective needed to get the modern arcade racing scene over the hump and in a place right next to those legendary franchises of the 90s.
That is precisely what makes Vision Reelle’s 4PGP – or, “Four-Player Grand Prix” – so compelling. Even at a glance, it looks like another game reaching for the status of de facto successor to Virtua Racing, but along for the development are Hitmaker veteran Kenji Sasaki and his lengthy resumé of Sega Rally credits, and composer Tomoyuki Kawamura, whose music and sound credits span some of Sega’s most foundational titles throughout the 90s. Both of these inclusions were welcome news to me, for very specific reasons. My hope was that Sasaki would offer valuable insights to the development team about why arcade racing games handle collisions differently than other racing genres, particularly in regard to lateral movement and rotation, while Kawamura could point out what current developers are doing right and wrong with soundtrack implementation (and maybe give 4PGP a vibe similar to those legendary coin-ops of the past). More on this in a moment.
From the moment you start it up, 4PGP does a fantastic job of serving as a time machine, sending you back to the early-to-mid-1990s arcade scene. If you’ve played games like Daytona USA or Sega Rally Championship, you’ll recognize the atmosphere immediately, as 4PGP would not look the least bit out of place in a four-seater showcase setup of linked arcade machines alongside similar setups for the games it clearly aspires to join. Full credit to Kawamura for getting the vibe just right and making sure 4PGP makes the best first impression possible.
Once you get started, 4PGP is exactly what it says on the tin – Four-Player Grand Prix, and that’s interesting in and of itself. Apart from the time trials, any of the game’s competitive modes can be played with up to four human players, including the multi-race championships, around which the entire model of unlocking content is built, giving multiplayer a little bit of added depth beyond the usual method of just sitting down with other players for a series of unrelated individual races–which, to be clear, you still absolutely can do.
4PGP feels remarkably like a modern-day Virtua Racing right off the jump. The controls feel absolutely perfect for the level of precision you’re going to want while engaging in open-wheel pack-racing, and the HUD conveniently volunteers the information about your tire condition that Virtua Racing just made you guess about, so you’ll be able to plan your pit strategy accordingly. One mechanic that 4PGP does not share with Virtua Racing is the nitrous boost, represented by a meter at the top of your screen just below the speedometer. Unlike other racing games where you can refill the boost through acts like drifting or speeding closely by other cars, 4PGP will only refill your nitrous in pit lane, so you really have to plan how you want to go about it.
In contrast to other arcade racers, where pit lane is a place where you trade a fixed amount of time to carry out repairs on your vehicle should you start running into mechanical trouble, 4PGP’s pit lane is instead a layered minigame. Pull into the pit lane and your vehicle will automatically slow, and both your nitrous and tire condition will gradually rise. A wheel will also pop up on the screen where you have to press the boost button when the pin is in a specific, variable slice of the wheel. Passing this minigame will completely fill both nitrous and tires, allowing you to immediately pull back onto the track ready to go. When playing well, you should be able to get through a normal three-lap race without running into trouble with either your boost or your tires, but it’s nice to know design decisions were made in the interest of keeping things moving when you do need to go off for repairs (or when you get into five-lap races on the Expert difficulty).
Each championship from Novice difficulty on gives you something to unlock. Starting from the first championship on Novice, you will receive a car for every cup you finish first overall until you’ve unlocked all 10 additional cars. From there, two tracks can also be unlocked by winning the final two cups on the hardest difficulty, bringing the game’s total course selection up to 14.
Unfortunately, this also exposes 4PGP’s particular focus on its championship campaign over its arcade influences, as each car you unlock is, in almost every case, objectively superior to the one that came before, culminating in an objective apex vehicle with all of its stats maxed out. The vast majority of the nuance lives in the game’s out-of-the-box selection of vehicles, none of which are competitive at Veteran or higher difficulty, as the curve appears pretty strictly tuned toward whatever cars you should have available when you get to any given event (assuming you’re playing in the implied order through the difficulties and championships). There just isn’t going to be any online discourse about why you should pick the Lumus over the Gallari, because there simply isn’t such a case to be made. The difference is absolute, demonstrable, and directly-documented. Sensible from a single-player or co-op progression standpoint, but immensely disappointing if 4PGP is to be taken at face value as an aspiring successor to games like Sega Rally Championship, whose Lancia Delta vs Toyota Celica duels remain the stuff of legend to this day.
This emphasis on “player(s) vs CPU” over head-to-head play informs other aspects of the game design as well. For example, where those older arcade racers kept collision and other crash physics very limited in order to keep the race moving and prevent an eight-lap race from ending on the second lap, under certain circumstances, 4PGP will gladly turn your car all the way around in a collision, forcing you to spend precious seconds turning around, or hit you with an insurmountable gap if you go off the road a little bit, bringing your car to a near stop. Being that the focus is on clearing championships and unlocking content that way, this was a sound decision representing added difficulty toward clearing the game, but it has the added effect of dumping buckets of cold water on races between human players more often than not. Your mileage may vary on whether this affects you personally as a player, but it does stand out nevertheless. I had personally hoped that Sasaki’s presence in particular would prevent something like this from happening, but I can certainly see how we still got here.
Outside of that aspect of design philosophy, 4PGP isn’t another case of an arcade-looking racer whose arcade attributes all fall apart the first time you try to turn. (I’m looking at you, Hotshot Racing!) This game truly handles like a dream, with some of the best analog controls made for either careful light navigation of tight racing packs or big sweeping turns alike, a definite credit to Sasaki’s presence in the room. Curiously, 4PGP’s selection of courses come modeled after real-life circuits, with adaptations of Spa-Francorchamps, Suzuka, and Silverstone among its 14 tracks, all adjusted to look and feel more like tracks made for arcade titles than their real-life counterparts. (Hilariously, with the ferris wheel being one of the most common arcade racing set pieces ever, the one that actually exists near Suzuka in Japan is missing from the landscape in 4PGP.) This navigation of real-life courses with the handling of an arcade racer might be jarring to some, but it provides a very unique experience that will serve as one of 4PGP’s hallmarks for the long run. Visually it is fun, imaginative, and memorable.
Also of note is the game’s implementation of music. Like Virtua Racing before it, 4PGP does not have full songs playing in the background throughout a race, opting instead to mark each new lap with a short loop, another nod to Virtua Racing. If music is constantly playing, that means you’re on the race’s final lap. Although a lengthier soundtrack would have been welcome here, this approach by Kawamura is commendable, giving you an audio cue that you just have this one lap remaining to either get to the front of the pack or defend your position without having to look up at the lap count.
If you think you’re going to sit down and casually blast through each championship on each difficulty, think again. The difficulty curve is undeniably steep and noticeable when you move from Novice to Veteran or from Veteran to Expert, likely a credit to the game’s long-term staying power as you work to obtain the requisite level of mastery needed on each course to unlock everything. It does also mean that some players simply aren’t going to see everything if they hit their skill ceiling somewhere along the way, and to that point, I would call it a positive that this game is arguably at its best both aesthetically and kinetically at the Novice difficulty before you’ve unlocked a single car. At the same time, if this game gets its hooks into you, you’re going to be spending a great deal of time sharpening your skills and working on your completion, to say nothing of any personal goals you might set once you get past that point–personal best lap and course times, and so on.
In the end, 4PGP’s appeal depends on how much of a purist you are about your arcade racing, because while it gets the aesthetic elements down flawlessly, and despite the genuine credibility that comes with bringing people like Sasaki and Kawamura along, it ultimately comes off more as a solo console player’s idea of what an arcade racing game is like, rather than what an actual arcade racing game is at the core. It’s 2026 and we can’t be too choosy, and if you’re not too hung up on the arcade design elements, this is a very easy game to recommend. If you want a more authentic experience, however, you’re still better off playing Formula Retro Racing: World Tour or waiting for Super Polygon Grand Prix to come out of Early Access.
The state of the arcade racing genre in 2026 is fascinating to say the least. Founding fathers Sega and Namco have been on a milk carton, apart from the surprising inclusion of Virtua Racing in the Sega Ages lineup over on Nintendo Switch, or the random Ridge Racer drop on Hamster’s Arcade Archives or the PlayStation Classics line. This has left the genre to a bunch of indie studios that have done a great job paying tribute to those old classics with games like Formula Retro Racing: World Tour, DDI Rally Championship, and most recently, Super Woden: Rally Edge. Tribute and succession are two different things, however, and as fun as a lot of these games can be, there’s a certain noticeable gap between them and the games that inspired them.
The state of the arcade racing genre in 2026 is fascinating to say the least. Founding fathers Sega and Namco have been on a milk carton, apart from the surprising inclusion of Virtua Racing in the Sega Ages lineup over on Nintendo Switch, or the random Ridge Racer drop on Hamster’s Arcade Archives or the PlayStation Classics line. This has left the genre to a bunch of indie studios that have done a great job paying tribute to those old classics with games like Formula Retro Racing: World Tour, DDI Rally Championship, and most recently, Super Woden: Rally Edge. Tribute and succession are two different things, however, and as fun as a lot of these games can be, there’s a certain noticeable gap between them and the games that inspired them.
It’s a situation I’ve been watching closely over the years, and have spoken on it extensively (here and here are good examples that might even serve as good preliminary viewing to further contextualize this review). The genuine return to prominence of the arcade racing genre is something I greatly hope for, even if the games that are building toward it haven’t actually gotten us there yet. One possible solution, I’ve speculated, is that bringing voices into the development studio from those legendary arcade racing teams of the past could give a project that extra little shot of design perspective needed to get the modern arcade racing scene over the hump and in a place right next to those legendary franchises of the 90s.
That is precisely what makes Vision Reelle’s 4PGP – or, “Four-Player Grand Prix” – so compelling. Even at a glance, it looks like another game reaching for the status of de facto successor to Virtua Racing, but along for the development are Hitmaker veteran Kenji Sasaki and his lengthy resumé of Sega Rally credits, and composer Tomoyuki Kawamura, whose music and sound credits span some of Sega’s most foundational titles throughout the 90s. Both of these inclusions were welcome news to me, for very specific reasons. My hope was that Sasaki would offer valuable insights to the development team about why arcade racing games handle collisions differently than other racing genres, particularly in regard to lateral movement and rotation, while Kawamura could point out what current developers are doing right and wrong with soundtrack implementation (and maybe give 4PGP a vibe similar to those legendary coin-ops of the past). More on this in a moment.
From the moment you start it up, 4PGP does a fantastic job of serving as a time machine, sending you back to the early-to-mid-1990s arcade scene. If you’ve played games like Daytona USA or Sega Rally Championship, you’ll recognize the atmosphere immediately, as 4PGP would not look the least bit out of place in a four-seater showcase setup of linked arcade machines alongside similar setups for the games it clearly aspires to join. Full credit to Kawamura for getting the vibe just right and making sure 4PGP makes the best first impression possible.
Once you get started, 4PGP is exactly what it says on the tin – Four-Player Grand Prix, and that’s interesting in and of itself. Apart from the time trials, any of the game’s competitive modes can be played with up to four human players, including the multi-race championships, around which the entire model of unlocking content is built, giving multiplayer a little bit of added depth beyond the usual method of just sitting down with other players for a series of unrelated individual races–which, to be clear, you still absolutely can do.
4PGP feels remarkably like a modern-day Virtua Racing right off the jump. The controls feel absolutely perfect for the level of precision you’re going to want while engaging in open-wheel pack-racing, and the HUD conveniently volunteers the information about your tire condition that Virtua Racing just made you guess about, so you’ll be able to plan your pit strategy accordingly. One mechanic that 4PGP does not share with Virtua Racing is the nitrous boost, represented by a meter at the top of your screen just below the speedometer. Unlike other racing games where you can refill the boost through acts like drifting or speeding closely by other cars, 4PGP will only refill your nitrous in pit lane, so you really have to plan how you want to go about it.
In contrast to other arcade racers, where pit lane is a place where you trade a fixed amount of time to carry out repairs on your vehicle should you start running into mechanical trouble, 4PGP’s pit lane is instead a layered minigame. Pull into the pit lane and your vehicle will automatically slow, and both your nitrous and tire condition will gradually rise. A wheel will also pop up on the screen where you have to press the boost button when the pin is in a specific, variable slice of the wheel. Passing this minigame will completely fill both nitrous and tires, allowing you to immediately pull back onto the track ready to go. When playing well, you should be able to get through a normal three-lap race without running into trouble with either your boost or your tires, but it’s nice to know design decisions were made in the interest of keeping things moving when you do need to go off for repairs (or when you get into five-lap races on the Expert difficulty).
Each championship from Novice difficulty on gives you something to unlock. Starting from the first championship on Novice, you will receive a car for every cup you finish first overall until you’ve unlocked all 10 additional cars. From there, two tracks can also be unlocked by winning the final two cups on the hardest difficulty, bringing the game’s total course selection up to 14.
Unfortunately, this also exposes 4PGP’s particular focus on its championship campaign over its arcade influences, as each car you unlock is, in almost every case, objectively superior to the one that came before, culminating in an objective apex vehicle with all of its stats maxed out. The vast majority of the nuance lives in the game’s out-of-the-box selection of vehicles, none of which are competitive at Veteran or higher difficulty, as the curve appears pretty strictly tuned toward whatever cars you should have available when you get to any given event (assuming you’re playing in the implied order through the difficulties and championships). There just isn’t going to be any online discourse about why you should pick the Lumus over the Gallari, because there simply isn’t such a case to be made. The difference is absolute, demonstrable, and directly-documented. Sensible from a single-player or co-op progression standpoint, but immensely disappointing if 4PGP is to be taken at face value as an aspiring successor to games like Sega Rally Championship, whose Lancia Delta vs Toyota Celica duels remain the stuff of legend to this day.
This emphasis on “player(s) vs CPU” over head-to-head play informs other aspects of the game design as well. For example, where those older arcade racers kept collision and other crash physics very limited in order to keep the race moving and prevent an eight-lap race from ending on the second lap, under certain circumstances, 4PGP will gladly turn your car all the way around in a collision, forcing you to spend precious seconds turning around, or hit you with an insurmountable gap if you go off the road a little bit, bringing your car to a near stop. Being that the focus is on clearing championships and unlocking content that way, this was a sound decision representing added difficulty toward clearing the game, but it has the added effect of dumping buckets of cold water on races between human players more often than not. Your mileage may vary on whether this affects you personally as a player, but it does stand out nevertheless. I had personally hoped that Sasaki’s presence in particular would prevent something like this from happening, but I can certainly see how we still got here.
Outside of that aspect of design philosophy, 4PGP isn’t another case of an arcade-looking racer whose arcade attributes all fall apart the first time you try to turn. (I’m looking at you, Hotshot Racing!) This game truly handles like a dream, with some of the best analog controls made for either careful light navigation of tight racing packs or big sweeping turns alike, a definite credit to Sasaki’s presence in the room. Curiously, 4PGP’s selection of courses come modeled after real-life circuits, with adaptations of Spa-Francorchamps, Suzuka, and Silverstone among its 14 tracks, all adjusted to look and feel more like tracks made for arcade titles than their real-life counterparts. (Hilariously, with the ferris wheel being one of the most common arcade racing set pieces ever, the one that actually exists near Suzuka in Japan is missing from the landscape in 4PGP.) This navigation of real-life courses with the handling of an arcade racer might be jarring to some, but it provides a very unique experience that will serve as one of 4PGP’s hallmarks for the long run. Visually it is fun, imaginative, and memorable.
Also of note is the game’s implementation of music. Like Virtua Racing before it, 4PGP does not have full songs playing in the background throughout a race, opting instead to mark each new lap with a short loop, another nod to Virtua Racing. If music is constantly playing, that means you’re on the race’s final lap. Although a lengthier soundtrack would have been welcome here, this approach by Kawamura is commendable, giving you an audio cue that you just have this one lap remaining to either get to the front of the pack or defend your position without having to look up at the lap count.
If you think you’re going to sit down and casually blast through each championship on each difficulty, think again. The difficulty curve is undeniably steep and noticeable when you move from Novice to Veteran or from Veteran to Expert, likely a credit to the game’s long-term staying power as you work to obtain the requisite level of mastery needed on each course to unlock everything. It does also mean that some players simply aren’t going to see everything if they hit their skill ceiling somewhere along the way, and to that point, I would call it a positive that this game is arguably at its best both aesthetically and kinetically at the Novice difficulty before you’ve unlocked a single car. At the same time, if this game gets its hooks into you, you’re going to be spending a great deal of time sharpening your skills and working on your completion, to say nothing of any personal goals you might set once you get past that point–personal best lap and course times, and so on.
In the end, 4PGP’s appeal depends on how much of a purist you are about your arcade racing, because while it gets the aesthetic elements down flawlessly, and despite the genuine credibility that comes with bringing people like Sasaki and Kawamura along, it ultimately comes off more as a solo console player’s idea of what an arcade racing game is like, rather than what an actual arcade racing game is at the core. It’s 2026 and we can’t be too choosy, and if you’re not too hung up on the arcade design elements, this is a very easy game to recommend. If you want a more authentic experience, however, you’re still better off playing Formula Retro Racing: World Tour or waiting for Super Polygon Grand Prix to come out of Early Access.
by Patrick Mifflin
