It’s been a good many years since we’ve seen a character roster quite so embarrassing as that offered in Street Trace: NYC.

The hopeful protagonists (dubbed ‘tracers’) line-up in front of you begging selection, each seemingly lifted wholesale from a ‘street cool’ 3D model library disc that fell off the front a second rate CG magazine in the mid-nineties. Token black man, Mack (‘Can’t nobody stop me now’ he blurts when you select him), rubs shoulders with the peroxide blonde, wrap-around shade-wearing Rocket, while Hotrod, his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt flapping in the breeze, stares with nonchalance through hollow eyes.

Meanwhile the girls pose all awkward gait; shoulders thrust back so their breasts balloon forwards, poor texturing and low polygon frames shifting the intended titillation to something closer to queasiness.

It’s a cruel way to start a review, and we’re sure that the character artist/ modeller is a frightfully nice chap who can turn out delightful work with the right tools, brief and budget, but the wider point is that this unsuccessful grasping at imagined street culture cool continues through every aspect of the game. The game’s visual framework is ugly, off-putting, lacking in any shade of authenticity or soul and the game is all the weaker for it.

Perhaps the developer felt bound to pitch the game’s style in this direction. After all, this is a futuristic hoverboard game set in a post-apocalyptic New York. Still, the whacky costumes and Z-list voice acting do nothing to bring life and vibrancy to the perpetually murky environments that make up the game’s drab vision of a future New York.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.