Millennium Runners Review: Broken, Crashing, and Unplayable | Anti-Gravity Racing Disaster

Millennium Runners is a high-speed racing game following in the footsteps of F-Zero, and more recently Redout. Millennium Runners features anti-gravity ships racing at ludicrous speeds around awe-inspiring tracks. It is all set to a very effective, pulse-pounding soundtrack but sadly, that’s where the illusion ends. To my complete surprise, Millennium Runners is less of a spectacle and more of a car crash in slow motion. A good concept is destroyed by a sequence of fatal errors. This game is broken and may never be fixed.

Let’s begin by getting the compliments out of the way.

First impressions are important, and the trailer implies that the game is going to deliver on the core elements of this kind of racing game: blistering speed, gorgeous visuals, gravity-defying tracks, and an energetic beat. In contrast to the rest of the game, these are parts that are successfully executed.

Even in the first few races, it is obvious that the anti-gravity ships are moving at a velocity approaching the speed of light. When you’re flying at top speed and boosting, everything becomes a blur, and this effect conveys the feeling of speed very well. In certain parts of the track, the blur effect might combine with twisting turns or changes in pitch to produce a genuine dizzying feeling. These visuals are complemented by the backdrop of the racetrack. The environments surrounding each of the tracks are interesting in their own way and provide beautiful views at times.

The soundtrack is the other standout and remaining compliment. Even from the main menu, the high-tempo energy is in full focus. That bumping soundtrack is so important in a game of this kind and was mostly satisfactory in Millennium Runners.

I found the controls to be decent with an Xbox controller, except for one thing. It wasn’t too hard to get used to, but an element of the gameplay and therefore the control scheme, feels out of place. The player is able to “open the left/right flap” in order to sharply turn. Instead of drifting to boost like in Mario Kart, this game would have the player initiate near-90-degree turns with the press of a trigger. It works well enough in practice, but I find that it threatens to take away from the fundamental feeling of speed.

With that out of the way, I will address the mountain of issues.

When I started the game for the first time, something looked off. There was a sort of fisheye effect going on, and it was strange and unsettling. The default settings were incorrect for my machine. Harmless enough, but a sign of what was to follow.

There is no other way of stating it: the game is broken.

The aforementioned “fatal errors” was deliberate wording- this game is dead. My first session with the game went on for 3 races before I experienced the “Fatal Error” crash. Now I encounter the crashing error in every race. No matter what I do, the game has been rendered unplayable and therefore must be avoided.

There really isn’t much more that needs to be said, but I want to explain the aspects of the game that I was able to see. I want to expose all of Millennium Runners' flaws; each one a nail in the coffin.

Millennium Runners is able to sell the illusion of speed, but that is really all that the game does decently. Each piece of the game is broken in its own way. Take, for example, the campaign mode’s Sponsors and Contracts systems. Even if the game were playable and progress could be made, the challenges and requirements to access these elements of the game are insane! One such challenge I can remember was to beat a specific time on a certain track. The time was impossible to achieve as far as I could tell, and that leads to my next point.

The NPCs cheat. The game is so broken that you can go from 1st to last in an instant without seeing another racer. The race begins with a silent countdown. The announcer's voice was not present beyond my first race.

Three.

Two.

One.

We all accelerate from the starting marks, and as the pack thins out, some of these racers will never be seen again. Because of this apparent disappearance, it is unclear to me whether I’m supposed to believe that I am racing other racers in real time, or if this is all some sort of digital connection and we are each running time trials.

Immersion = ruined.

A highlight of infuriating moments was being struck by one of these ghost racers. Despite being on different planes of the multiverse -or something- these NPC racers appear to fire items at you along the race. This is enraging for two reasons: firstly, how can I defend against a seemingly endless series of items, and secondly, why do I never get the good items? This isn’t a case of Mario Kart, where there are few items and each one is visually intuitive. I can genuinely say that I have no idea what any of the items I picked up were other than “Turbo” and that is only because of the announcer. He must have arrived sometime after the start of the race.

I used all of the items I acquired to see what they did, and to my surprise, one of them even seemed to hit me instead of an opponent.

I also found that the item boxes were often easy to miss, as if my ship isn’t exactly where it appears to be.

I could go on, but at this point I’m beating a dead horse.

Millennium Runners is a broken and deeply flawed game.