Needs A Rolling Start
HIGH Ricocheting through the last 20% of “Weave” with sparks flying en route to a record time.
LOW The overly technical and slow “Palm” track.
WTF It is insanely goofy that the sharpest turns are the easiest.
The simplest kind of racing comes in the form of the slot car. There’s no drafting, no steering, no brakes — just a grooved track and a way to go faster. Little Laps leans into this simplicity. There’s no story, no characters, and little customization, just 18 tracks (all accessible immediately) and 15 cars (unlocked by getting achievements) run by two buttons, one to go faster and the other to restart.
Most of those tracks are attractive, if somewhat lacking in background detail. The colors occasionally grate on the eyes, however, especially in the track labeled “Night”. The various cars amount to being just skins, as there are no differences in handling — it’s a slot racer — or acceleration, which is universally sluggish.
The key quirk of Little Laps is that velocity entering the curve doesn’t matter. As my parents know well, a slot car will take off into the air if it hits a hairpin too fast, but in Little Laps any curve can be passed safely as long as the accelerator isn’t touched while the car is turning.
An amusing consequence of this feature is that it inverts expectations about handling. Gentler curves become dangerous places where it’s easy to keep the accelerator down a fraction of a second too long. Hairpins become prime opportunities to gain speed, since they can tolerate the pedal hitting the metal almost up to the last instant.
When this gets going it looks great. Cars throw off sparks as they drift through absurdly sharp corners and weave automatically through wild S-curves with their tires squealing. An available “best time” shadow provided a yardstick against my own performance and global leaderboards let me see my progress against other gamers.
I enjoyed playing Little Laps in small bites, and it’s well-suited to the rhythm of making a few quick attempts at a record time, possibly shaving a few tenths of a second off this lap. In case of a wipeout, I can just hit the reset button and get right back in it.
Or, that’s what one would hope.
The sluggish acceleration rate has another consequence, in that the key to a record lap is entering it with momentum. The first lap, starting from a dead stop, will never produce a record time after the first attempt. As I continued to optimize play, I sometimes found that I needed a second lap to get up enough entry speed to have a chance at a record.
This means that a player isn’t really right back in the action after a wreck. Each restart entails a sluggish first lap before there’s any chance at improving time. Sometimes that lap helped me calm down after a stupid mistake, but mostly it felt like a waste.
Worse, that slow initial run doesn’t offer the opportunity to learn anything about timing acceleration for record-lap tries. As I played, I often noticed myself being more conservative than was reasonable (even when I was trying for a record) simply because I wanted to avoid those wasted laps.
That dead start ends up being a real drag on the whole experience, which is a shame. Little Laps is a charming and zippy single-button racer, but in a stripped-down, minimalist experience everything has to be just right and here a major element isn’t.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Conradical Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home built Windows 11 PC with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There is no multiplayer mode.
Parents: As of press time this game has not been rated by the ESRB. It contains nothing worse than a car flying off a racetrack (with no visible wreck damage) and should logically be rated E.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has no dialogue or story text. I found that the sound of tire squeals was helpful in judging when to let go of the accelerator, and accordingly found it somewhat more difficult to improve my times when I turned off sound.
Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. By default the space bar serves as the accelerator and R resets the race. Menus require the mouse. On an Xbox controller the A button is the accelerator and Y resets. Note: I found that when using a controller to move through the menus the cursor sometimes got “lost” and I had to back out with the B button.
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