By and large, the racing games of 2023 are designed with hardcore commitment in mind. If you enjoy spending hours finding the ideal exhaust manifold and weight distribution for your virtual ride, more power to you. I feel more at home with the classic arcade racers of my youth—and if you’re anything like me, Aquiris Game Studio’s Horizon Chase Turbo is a great throwback that gives you that jolt of speed you’re looking for.

There’s nothing complicated about Horizon Chase Turbo. It’s an unapologetic love letter to Parallax-scrolling retro classics like Out Run and Top Gear. You select a sports car, paint it, and then take it for a spin around increasingly intricate tracks as you work to make a name for yourself in the racing world. There’s no fancy gear shifting or engine fiddling—just your accelerator, your brake, and 11 other racers who want to keep you away from that pole position.

Horizon Chase Turbo’s simple accessibility is its greatest strength. Like Top Gear—its most obvious inspiration—it strikes a balance between responsive controls and playful arcade physics. (The game also features Top Gear’s nitro system, which gives you three boosts to use during each race, granting a layer of additional strategy.) Bashing into a rival when you both round a hairpin turn might give you a momentary advantage, but don’t be surprised when the aggressive AI does the same to you on the next lap. 

Sticking to the inside of each turn is generally a good strategy, but it’s important to know the relative strengths of your car. For example, I generally stuck to a car with good handling in the early stages, which meant I could hit almost every turn without letting off the gas. However, I eventually had to switch to a car with better acceleration and top speed once I got to Horizon Chase Turbo’s final tracks, as I simply couldn’t keep up with the competition anymore.

Horizon Chase Turbo’s approachable gameplay is its best attribute, but it has plenty going for it beyond that. It has a pounding electrobeat soundtrack that perfectly fits its old-school aesthetic as well as colorful tracks that differentiate themselves beyond the usual racing game environments that you’ve seen before. However, Horizon Chase Turbo’s real secret weapon is its sheer breadth of content. It has dozens of tracks and a meaningful sense of progression.

For comparison’s sake, it took me more than 10 hours to conquer its World Tour mode, and I skipped many of the optional events that were off the beaten path. Additionally, there were plenty of challenges that I left uncompleted, like getting first place in every race while collecting optional trinkets on the road. And that doesn’t even take the game’s various DLC packages into account, which include a homage to the legendary racing driver Ayrton Senna.

As a whole, Horizon Chase Turbo is my idea of the perfect lunch break game. It’s easy to learn, but it offers just enough challenge to keep you coming back for more, especially once you hit that flow state where you’re passing competitors left and right. It may lack the expertly tuned verisimilitude of today’s biggest racing games, but that’s kind of the point. Horizon Chase Turbo might be a throwback, but it’s far from dated—and if you like it, you should check out its sequel, Horizon Chase 2, which Aquiris released recently.

Horizon Chase Turbo is available on the Epic Games Store.