Super Pilot is an arcade racer following the footsteps of F-Zero. The game follows F-Zero’s ideas pretty closely and is a perfected execution of a modern take on the mechanics. I struggle to find anything to dislike about Super Pilot and can’t wait for it to continue getting updates and eventually release out of Early Access.

In this game, you won’t be using anything but pure skill and understanding of mechanics to win a race. There are no powerups and no random advantages. If you are better than the people you play with, or the artificial intelligence, you will simply be better. There’re no blue shells or lightning strikes to cheat you out of a victory. Now, this can be seen as bad because it does mean Super Pilot’s racing is very simple. At the same time, taking away the random factors of a lot of other arcade racers makes this one significantly fairer. You will win because you are better, or you will lose because you’re worse.

The most important mechanics in Super Pilot are related to boost. There are 3 ways to boost: Energy pickups, drifting, and a boost button with an overheat meter. Energy pickups are pre-placed on each track, and all racers can pick up the same one, so they don’t ever disappear. Most maps are generous with energy placement and hitting these are essential to winning a race. Drifting is almost equally important but requires precise timing to pull off. When you drift, a white meter shows up under your ship. To boost off of a drift, you must let go of the drift button as soon as the white meter fills up. The boost button is a way to boost in between energy pickups and drifts. Boosting this way fills up a red meter at the top of the screen. If this fills up fully, your ship will explode from overheating. You can also overheat by slamming into walls or other racers. Boost is extremely important and if you aren’t boosting, you are almost guaranteed to lose a race.

The most important parts of Super Pilot are the level editor and community levels. There are hundreds upon hundreds of community levels already made, and I’m sure more are to come. The level editor itself is intuitive and easy to use, to the point where you can use a gamepad to create your tracks. Track pieces are easy to place and move around, and things like a loop have presets that you can just place down.

You can choose between 4 different ships currently and each is better in one thing over the other. One of them has tight turn control but is slow to accelerate, another does the exact opposite, and a third is a balanced in-between ship. All ships are balanced and it is completely possible to play well with any of them.

There are a variety of ways to play the game. You can play local multi-player split-screen with up to 4 people or you can play with up to 48 bots. Local multi-player works perfectly. Bots are incredible in Super Pilot. You can race them on any track, including community levels. Not only that, but they are competent. My biggest issue with most racing games is that the AI is always way too easy to beat, even on hard. The AI in Super Pilot is surprisingly difficult to beat even on medium. Another way to play is to race yourself in time attack mode, which has online leaderboards for any track. Unfortunately, there is no online multi-player in the game currently, but I think the fantastic local multi-player and the competent bots make up for it.

The art is very colorful and is pleasing on the eyes. The sound and music design compliment this. My only gripe with sound is the constant beeping of the overheat meter when I’m close to overheating but otherwise, sounds have a nice oomph to them but still have that arcade game feeling, and the music is this nice light-hearted electronic soundtrack. Controls feel great and are easy to understand. The ship glides just the way you think it would, and controlling it is perfectly tight. Controls are fully rebindable.

Morally there is not much to take note of. The ship explodes into a fiery death when you crash, but no person is in the ship. The only other thing that is worth mentioning is that players can create levels with no filter. I have not come across a vulgar track name or shape though.

Super Pilot does everything it wants to and executes it very well. The simplistic nature of the game makes skill more important than luck and turns it into one of my favorite arcade racers on PC. It’s fast, accessible, and just downright fun. Highly recommended at full price!