Screamer review | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these Racing Tokyo Xtreme Racer review: Embodying the stylish spirit of street racing Racing Sonic Racing: Crossworlds review – Always chaotic, occasionally frustrating Roguelike Battle Suit Aces review: The best spaceship deckbuilder since Cobalt Core Racing The creators of Rain World were tired of making something so depressing, so their next game is a ‘loud and dumb and fast’ cyberpunk racer you can try in the Steam Next Fest Roguelike Megabonk review: Brilliant dumb fun that’ll have you bonking monsters for hours FPS High on Life 2 review Action Hell is Us review: a gorgeous adventure that gets in its own way a little too often FPS Highguard review Horror Reanimal review: Astonishingly bleak and oblique survival horror Rhythm Rhythm Doctor review: A musical masterclass in doing a lot with very little Action Cairn review: A gripping ‘strand-game’ about the limits of the body Action One of my favorite Next Fest demos turned out to be this speedrunner’s delight modeled after 3D Sonic games, which just added ranked multiplayer races RPG Code Vein 2 review: a breezy hack-and-slash in soulslike clothing RPG Roadtrip RPG Keep Driving teaches you that a hitchhiker is just a friend you haven’t met, and that friend might have weed Sports Skateboarding games had a huge 2025, but it was the controversial Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 that I couldn’t put down Popular PC Gamer ClipsCrimson DesertMarathonBest PC gearGDCQuizzes Games Racing When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. 72 Screamer review A battle cry against samey racers, but Screamer drifts wide of excellence Reviews By Phil Iwaniuk published 22 March 2026 0 Comments Join the conversation (Image: © Milestone) Our Verdict An immaculately presented arcade racer with a thousand good ideas, but the twin-stick drifting wasn’t one of them. PC Gamer’s got your back Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware. In a genre where so many games are determined to squabble over who can make the best LIDAR-scanned Monza, we need more Screamers. Milestone’s narrative-led, anime-infused arcade racer has a delightful plethora of fresh ideas, and it lavishes meticulous care into realising them. It’s distinct and idiosyncratic, in all the ways a game should be, all the ways we fear they won’t be when AI gets its tendrils further into the medium. In many ways it’s everything I’d want a racer to be in 2026. Just one problem: I don’t like the driving.Need to KnowWhat is it? A futuristic racing tournament with slightly too much oil on its roads.Release date March 26, 2026Expect to pay $60/£50Developer MilestonePublisher MilestoneReviewed on i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAMSteam Deck Deck: VerifiedLink Official siteEvery other way Screamer wants to do things differently, I can get on board with. I love that the extensive cast of racers competing in the Screamer tournament all speak in their own native languages, so within one scene I might hear Japanese, Italian, Flemish and an Irish lilt, and understand them all via subtitles. I love the interplay between the teams, and the members of those teams. It feels like a different way to approach narrative in racing games, which typically boils down to the same few soap opera plots.Screamer seems determined not to revert to type here, filling your brain with sharply drawn character archetypes that draw from a bigger world of influences than simply ‘Need For Speed 2003-present’. Take the Green Reapers, for example, the first team that Tournament mode introduces you to. It begins simply enough: Róisín, Frederic and Hiroshi have some kind of beef with tournament organiser Mr A, so they enter with revenge on their minds.Article continues below You may like Tokyo Xtreme Racer review: Embodying the stylish spirit of street racing Sonic Racing: Crossworlds review – Always chaotic, occasionally frustrating Battle Suit Aces review: The best spaceship deckbuilder since Cobalt Core As the races progress, you see the tensions within the trio, familial power struggle stuff. Then the points of origin for those tensions, and then why those tensions lead each character to react in the way they do when unforeseen events transpire. It’s more narrative rigour than I was expecting in a game about making cars go fast, honestly. It’s not shoehorned in, either. The exposition feels as much a part of the game as the racing does, because there’s a cohesion to all the component parts here. The glue is the anime presentation, complete with a Persona-style intro cutscene which shows your retinas more colours than you previously thought existed.The developers at Milestone are self-confessed anime geeks and fighting game aficionados, and somehow pulling those inspirations out of situ and into this game makes everything flow naturally, from a dialogue exchange between 2D character avatars, into a bombastic race in a dystopian future, and then swapping out spoilers in a vehicle customisation menu.AdriftImage 1 of 5(Image credit: Milestone)(Image credit: Milestone)(Image credit: Milestone)(Image credit: Milestone)(Image credit: Milestone)I need to talk about the handling model and controls, though. Screamer wants to nod to its 1995 spiritual predecessor, Milestone’s first release, by capturing the same exaggerated drifts that characterised that DOS era racer. It does this by mapping steering to the left analog stick, and drifting to the right stick. That twin-stick driving is very disorienting, and transitioning from a full drift angle to facing straight ahead is awkward, because you don’t feel the weight transfer. An irk that’s made even trickier by the camera’s exaggerated lateral movement when you initiate a drift.It feels like patting your head while performing keyhole surgery. I admire the game for taking such a bold approach to handling and discerning itself from everything else out there, including NFS: Unbound’s tap-to-drift style and JDM: Japanese Drift Master’s forensic physics-based approach. But even after the hours it took me to acclimatise to this handling style,
