After half an hour of Spectra, the first game from Gateway Interactive, I found myself struck by a distinct but persistent thought, one I tried to shake unsuccessfully for a long time.

 

"This can't be it, right?"

 

It's never good when anything makes you think that and sometimes it reflects poorly on the person thinking it, but I couldn't help myself. Why? Well, let's be clear about one thing: Spectra is not a game. It's not even a demo, it's a proof of concept, a sample prototype that got lost and ended up for sale when nobody was keeping an eye on it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I'd unlocked every reward after in less than an hour, and it wasn't like I was sprinting for the finish. I was retrying certain tracks, making notes for the review and trying to work out whether I'd seen this bit of racecourse before. Spoiler warning - I usually had.

 

But let's start at the beginning. Spectra is an arcade racing game on the Xbox One that's putting all its eggs in the "look how retro we are" basket, a deliberate throwback to the days of the Atari and the eighties in general. It's also got a surprising amount of work put into the music score, which is one of the things you unlock as you go. Actually, it's the only thing you unlock as you go.

 

And that's pretty much everything you can say about it. There's no story, no real progression, no objectives besides trumping your previous leaderboard scores. You spend the whole time in a little spaceship racing along what looks like an early design of Mario Kart's Rainbow Road, albeit if it was redesigned for Tron. There are three things you'll meet along the way: barriers which make you lose points, cubes which make you gain points, and boosters which will make you fall off the road and die.

 

If all this sounds like it came straight from the "arcade racing game checklist," you'd be right, but that's not to say there's absolutely no fun to be had here. Every now and then I found myself sitting up a little more, getting slightly engaged as I tried to keep my combo going, scooping up squares, jumping off ramps and grinding lasers like a rejected Marty McFly. My stony little heart fluttered a little when I pulled off some epic steering manoeuvre that finished with a huge jump across the void of time and space. I won't say that I'm above that sort of thing.

 

Except that none of it counts for squat, and it wasn't long until I realised this. All the tracks are randomly generated from a noticeably small pool of road sections, so within a short amount of time I was getting deja vu and realised that all that was being changed was the background music. And you don't even need to beat a course before you unlock another song, you just need to try it out once. So you could very plausibly drop off the track in the first second and yet still get a big fanfare and applause when you die, as Spectra kisses your feet and hands over another gift like a nervous spouse to an ill-tempered mother-in-law.

 

I didn't even like the unlockable songs, quite frankly. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good soundtrack when I'm playing a game and I was hoping for some fun jams to get me all fired up, but the music sounded like a keyboard being assaulted and it's not long before you realise that it's all fairly interchangeable. Tell me, fans of Spectra, which was your favourite? The dynamic up-tempo electro synth song in a minor key, or the other nine dynamic up-tempo electro synth songs in minor keys?

 

I wanted Spectra to be better than it was, I really did, and to its rapidly diminishing credit there's nothing inherently offensive to it. But it's dull and too lacking in meat to be anything more than a brief and forgettable time-killer. Any enjoyment I found was lost under constant repetition and the headache-inducing music score. Sadly, it seems Gateway Interactive are off to a shaky start. Here's hoping they do better next time.