Phantom Spark Review (PS5) – A Spark of Joy

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Phantom Spark Review (PS5) – A Spark of Joy

Phantom Spark, an upcoming release from Coatsink and Ghosts, is a high-speed racing game where you compete in a series of time-trial races across different domains.

You’re controlling a Spark, a sci-fi racing kart. As you progress, you unlock new tracks, customization options for your Spark, and new challenges.

Let me start by saying this: I’m not a fan of racing or time-trial-esque games. I dread playing racing mini-games tucked within other titles; I tend to avoid them as much as possible.

Mario Kart and other party games, where the chaos is part of the charm, are the only racing titles I can stomach. So when I entered the world of Phantom Spark on the PS5, I wasn’t expecting much.

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To my surprise, I found myself refusing to put it down, grinning more than grumbling. Despite being quite simple in premise, it was a much-welcome surprise that I’d suggest anyone to give a shot.

Phantom Spark comes to Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation on 15 August 2024.

A Game That Gets Straight to the Point

Phantom Spark knows its core audience, and it gives them exactly what they want. No needless exposition, an hour-long tutorial, and hundreds of menus to sift through. Do you want to race? You’re going to race. From the second you launch the game, you can get into a track in seconds, and begin racing even faster.

In this title, you’re challenged to run tracks between three different domains, each one headed by a Champion. You’ll run through the track once by yourself before you start running challenges against yourself from your first attempt, and the Champion of the track.

They appear as Phantoms on the track that you can pass through, one serving as a reminder of how you once were and the other giving you friendly competition to do even better.

Aside from these tracks, there are Trials you can compete in where you’ll go against another NPC Spark, testing your skill on a very specific maneuver. These can be super challenging but are twice as satisfying to nail.

If you’re itching to play against real people, the game also has a 4-player split-screen option (that I unfortunately could not try out) and a worldwide leaderboard. It’s not the type of game to require public matchmaking, and you’ll never run out of people to test your mettle against. All the competition, but none of the toxicity!

A Cohesive Delight From Start to Finish

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Phantom Spark is what you get when you and your team support the same vision. | Credit: Ghosts, Coatsink

Seamless. That’s the first thing that pops into my mind when I think about Phantom Spark. Every motion in-game and outside, from steering your Spark to moving between menus and progressing through tracks, is entirely seamless.

The controls are simple: you steer with the left Joystick, accelerate with R2, and hit the brakes with L2. If you mess up on a track—which you will, many times—you can hit Triangle (△) to go back to the start of the track.

The countdown immediately begins, and within a second, you’re racing again. For someone as impatient as I am, I cannot begin to explain how enamored I was with Phantom Spark‘s workings.

It’s not just in a race, but there’s a momentum the game keeps up even within the menus. You’re never blocked by UI bloat, lost in menus, or spamming buttons to upgrade your vehicle.

All you have is your Spark, you, and the tracks. You win based on your skill, and making restarts as simple as pressing a button makes it so that you’re never taken ‘out of the zone.’

The game has a futuristic theme which is maintained throughout the tracks, the Sparks, the music, and the character designs.

Speaking of the music and the sound design, I have to give it a special shout-out. The music amplifies the vibe of Phantom Spark so perfectly, and the extra work the studio did to create alternate versions of every track just for the pause menu is another example of the game maintaining cohesiveness and momentum throughout.

Mindless Fun for as Long as You Want

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Customization is extremely limited, but it’s not a major issue. | Credit: Ghosts, Coatsink

If there’s anything I have to complain about, it’s the lack of customization. The Sparks have a very simple design, and the most customization you can do is choose between ****** gradient presets.

It would be nice if you could pick the colors of the gradient yourself or add and remove some parts of your Spark, but I can also see how that would end up adding bloat and ruining the momentum I spoke of earlier.

Phantom Spark is a short title, and not that kind of game either. I can respect that, the same way it’s respected my time throughout.

The game isn’t just about being fast, but being better than you were a moment ago. Again, I’m no fan of racing titles or time trials, but this game scratched an ***** I didn’t even know I had.

It’s all about racing, and there’s not much to it outside of that. But what it does, it does well.

Phantom Spark – 8/10

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