Midget Race

Midget Race is a simple top-down racing game available in Czech and English with Czech voice-acting for the dialogue there is.
It is solidly built, but very frustrating in many parts due to its collision mechanics in combination with too many laps to finish with frankly subpar dialogue and story.

You start off your career after a lineout of your dream, idolizing Wayne Wheelman (see the alliteration? That one's neat). Well, there is a whole page of text when I want simply start the game.
It is supposedly meant to be funny, as the game advertises. It is not funny, sadly. Facepalming borderline offensive, maybe.
There is a joke about the protagonist winning a race so early that "by the time the second racer crossed the line, he had already been having dinner with his girlfriend in four seasons". A little too much. The narrator's face is also covering part of the dialogue.


I am not your audience, I get it.

If you win a race, you will unlock the next map/race and see one of two different winning messages. One saying you are as fast as a "soap in jailhouse", and one talking about how female fans flash their boobs to get your autograph.
If you lose a race, you have your coach scream at you for how you are DESTROYING everything he ever did. That, and you have to redo the race.
None of these lines are satisfying to me. I suppose with the creator calling themselves Raiper34 and Midget for small I could have anticipated some of this, but I went into this blind. As lovely as boobs are, can there be some additional messages maybe? Why is this the only thing highlighted?
It does not help that the font itself is very small and terrible to read. I had to concentrate and stop for a moment to read any of it. The narration is on low volume and sounds rather monotonous? I do not understand the language, though, so it is hard to tell. I tried to ignore it.

Thankfully, there is barely any story going on. You progress course after course on which you complete 8 laps either racing against three other cars or against a timer. Over time you unlock new cars which you need to use if you do not want to lose instantly as your opponents gear up as well (even if you drive perfectly, as acceleration is nothing compared to speed).
There is one racing track which is pretty alright but can feel a little draggy over longer periods of time.

The controls are straight-forward, you use your arrow-keys to accelerate/go backwards and to steer left and right.
There are actually a number of great pointers RyaReisender left on the gamepage, mainly to make it a little more fun and exciting in-race.
One being that the fact you use one hand for all movements puts a huge strain on it (mine still hurts from playing, actually, and it's been two hours), and other layouts would be appreciated. Like holding shift for accelerating.

The game responds well and quickly, although the small map size can make it difficult to judge your movement properly as it can come off as too strong. It can also put the lap-count as you pass by the goal go over the edge of your screen, hiding it.
That said, I found it hard to move precisely for longer periods of time. The biggest problem is that once you are starting to get jittery or drive into something, it costs you badly and there is little you can do to just keep going.
Obstacles can rarely if ever be bypassed by steering to the other direction - even if you are just barely scraping it. This is particularily an issue for buildings with their long walls. Trees are easier to scrape off at.


It looks simple.

Which means: you already lost your momentum and need to accelerate again, but even worse, you need to move backwards, fiddle around with your movements backwards in all kinds of positions as it is top-down (it has been quite confusing to do that, especially starting out), then start back onto the road and hope not to get stuck again as it is very difficult to judge the exact mobility and collision edge.

If you do try to keep moving forward, it is a gamble between maybe slowly getting away with it, or being stuck forever. And having to lose even more time.
You can argue about technicalities, but being stuck when you barely scraped something on a tiny screen is not fun. It is very frustrating. Very, very frustrating.
The game coincidentally also relies on you nailing all your laps to make it difficult. And you have eight of them. Eight.

Your opponents generally start off a little slower then you, so you will always have a head-start, and are just slightly slower than you. They will, however, never make mistakes and go at a constant pace. You can drive through them thankfully (otherwise it would be a lot harder to do much anything).
It is very doable and challenging on some maps, but one particularily curvy map had me direly frustrated as it was (I think) the third map of the game and had an incredibly tight time limit. So eight laps of curvy goodness - if you get stuck badly once you practically had to restart already. Lost a few seconds during the first lap? Restart, not worth it. It took me about 20 tries, probably more.

I can appreciate the general mechanics after a little bit of getting used to, but the fact it was more a game of attrition as you need to keep it up for 8 laps perfectly made it utterly frustrating to play. 4 laps would be a lot more satisfying even with the same pace/difficulty.
A bounce-mechanic (so bouncing back a little bit) of the obstacles would also make it much easier to get back on track and allow for a few mistakes to be okay, and would not make any little mistake fatal if you were simply unlucky. Unlucky translates to frustrating.

There is also a mode where you try to run over as many people as you can (before that I had not quite realized those colorful dots were supposed to be spectators, and I was puzzled), which works pretty well.
There are also multiplayer options, it seems under a free play mode.

I stopped playing some time after getting the second car as I was frankly having a horrible time and had the image of that curving map - now with cars as my opponents - flashing up.

I cannot recommend this as it is. You may want to give it a shot if you want to go for a quick splitscreen-multiplayer title.