It’s time to bring in the Mach Rider! The gameplay isn’t my favorite but the game deserves some props for actually having a story. That’s a whole lot more than I can say for some games, that’s for sure! It’s not a whole lot of a story of course, it’s mainly a prompt that you get before every level but the main theme here is that aliens have taken over and we have to take them down. It’s what the Mach Rider does!

The story mode is 10 levels long and basically you just have to survive until you get to the end of the level. This may sound easy but the game is actually fairly difficult. Basically you have to drive through a fairly narrow road while dodging any obstacles and pitfalls in your way. You have 4 speed levels, if you stay on 1-2, you will be slower than the CPUs so they will ram into you which causes you to lose. If you go on 3-4 you will stay ahead but will have a really hard time controlling your car. Other times the enemies will come from in front of you so you need to blast them away with your machine gun. It’s definitely a handy weapon to have but you can run out of ammo so be careful how you use it.

With the power of rewind and access points I did good, but this would be a super difficult challenge without it. I can’t imagine that you would have had too much fun at that point because when you lose you go all the way back to the first level again. That’s always a pet peeve of mine in any game. Be as difficult as you want to be but at least restart me on the same level. If you take me too far back then that’s just rough. There are more modes to be played though.

You have endurance where you just drive without any computers around. You have to make it to a certain distance within the time frame and then you win. It’s a pretty interesting way to go about things and I thought it was actually the most fun mode. You really had to be careful here and I made it pretty far even without using any of the Switch features. I always felt like it was mostly luck though that kept me from crashing because I really could not see where I was going at all. The objects were coming in at the speed of light, even the game couldn’t always process them in time.

There were also battle challenges about seeing how many racers you could beat. This is more effort than the average NES title so I appreciated that. The graphics aren’t bad for their time and the music is okay. Alas, at the end of the day gameplay is the King when talking about a game. You need that to be on point and the style wasn’t really something I was super into. For racing games I always like the 3D titles so you know where you are going and can make plans. In a more overhead setting like this, it’s harder to see the object before bumping into it which is my main problem. So no matter how much content the game has, it can only go so far for me as a result.

Overall, Mach Rider is a fun game in super short doses but doesn’t have the staying power for me to call it good. I’m ready to call it quits after 20 minutes which is just way too short. For a game to be good, it needs to be one that can last and ultimately this was just not up to the task. If you have the Switch Online then there is no reason not to check it out but ultimately it will be forgotten in the end. There are just better racing games that you can find around every corner that exceed this one and outplay it at every turn. The concept of the Mach Rider is solid though. Make a modern 3D remake of this game with a big story and there is a lot of potential to be had.

Overall 5/10