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With the closure of Studio Liverpool three years ago and the lack of a new F-Zero title from Nintendo, it's been a rough few years for fans of futuristic racing games. Thankfully, 2015 is closing out in style with the release of Fast Racing Neo on Wii U. With this title, developer Shin'en demonstrates its technical prowess with some of the most impressive visuals we've seen on Nintendo's console . It's an example of old-school graphics programming at its finest, where smart optimisations and clever tricks produce results exceeding typical expectations for the platform. With so many smaller teams building games using off the shelf middleware these days, it's a rare treat indeed to experience such an impressive-looking game engineered entirely in-house.Evidence of its technical prowess can be seen right from the download screen - Fast Racing Neo weighs in at meagre 556MB. This comes as no surprise considering Shin'en's roots in the demo scene as Abyss, but in the days of 10GB patches, it's a refreshing change of pace. This small file size does come with some compromises though - the presentation wrapped around the game - including its menu system - is rather barebones, lacking even a basic options menu. However, this too feels like a nice throwback to simpler times before developer logos and intro movies got between you and the action.
When it comes to a game of this speed, the single most important metric is always going to be frame-rate and Fast Racing Neo delivers in spades with a slick 60fps presentation. Testing each of its 16 tracks, we can confirm that general performance is generally very consistent across the board. We say generally as there are specific areas in certain tracks which exhibit dropped frames - thankfully such moments are rare.
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