SCREAMER

Thirty years after the original Screamer went toe-to-toe with Ridge Racer on MS-DOS, Milestone — the studio behind a decade of straight-faced MotoGP and Ride sims — has done the last thing anyone expected: it has reborn its forgotten racer as a loud, anime-drenched arcade brawler where you don't just overtake rivals, you knock them out.

The pitch is gloriously unhinged. Screamer is an arcade racer built on fighting-game logic. Every car carries a Strike to lash out at opponents, a Shield to parry incoming hits, and an Overdrive super-state you charge by racing aggressively and cleanly. Land enough damage and you score a KO — a flashy, screen-shaking takedown that vaults you up the pack. It is, as IGN put it, racing that demands "both the finesse of Wipeout and the tactics and aggression of Mario Kart," and when the systems click, nothing else on PS5 feels quite like it.

Five teams, eighteen drivers, one stage

Screamer frames its world as a televised motorsport spectacle hosted by a manic Announcer, with five rival teams — the vengeful Green Reapers, the militaristic Strike Force Romanda, the yakuza-coded Kagawa-Kai, the experimental Jupiter Stormers and the corporate Anaconda Corp — each anchoring a story chapter and a roster of wildly distinct drivers. All eighteen characters play differently, every one hung on a signature mechanic: Hiroshi's volatile Unstable Boost, Lavinia's Perfect-Boost Hyperactive engine, Dirk's KO-hungry Blood Thirst, Aisha's parry-focused JSI Defense System. Learning a character is its own small fighting-game lab, and the campaign keeps rotating you through them so you actually do.

It looks the part, too. This is the most stylish thing Milestone has ever shipped — cel-shaded character art, chunky UI, a thumping synthwave-meets-J-rock soundtrack, and tracks that strobe past in sheets of neon. The PS5 Pro version holds a clean, high frame rate even when the screen dissolves into Overdrive particle chaos, and the haptics sell every Strike and parry.

The learning wall

That depth is also Screamer's biggest barrier. The first few hours are genuinely confusing: the game throws Strike, Shield, slipstream KOs, Entropy and Sync meters and Overdrive timing at you faster than it explains them, and until those clicks the racing can feel like noise. The single-player content is on the lean side — five short story chapters and a suite of arcade modes (Team Race, Score Challenge, Checkpoints, Overdrive Challenge) — so a chunk of the value lives in mastering characters and chasing scores rather than a long campaign. Reviews landed warm but not ecstatic for exactly that reason: PC Gamer's 72 and IGN's 8 bracket a game that's bold and distinct but rough at the edges and a little thin once the novelty settles.

For trophy hunters it's a refreshingly skill-based platinum rather than a collectible hunt. You'll clear all five team storylines, then grind the combat mechanics — 200 Strike KOs, 100 Overdrive KOs, 50 Shield parries — and, most demanding of all, post a mastery feat with every single one of the eighteen drivers. There are no missables in the traditional sense; everything is replayable from the menus. The real ask is getting good. Our full guide below breaks down all 51 trophies, every character's mastery requirement, and the fastest setups for the grindy ones.