Summer Catchers

Note: I completed the entire campaign ~8 hours, anything further was additional achievement hunting.
Summer Catchers is a cute arcade racing game that follows a young girl's journey to visit the ocean and see summer. While there are quirks that detract from the overall quality of the game, the mechanics are sufficiently solid with no bugs such that the casual experience is enjoyable. Moreover while the game does not innovate or expand on its already established core mechanic, it is carried by a cute art style and complimentary music that carries the game into a basic but enjoyable experience.
Pros:
* The art style is cute and charming, fully embracing the benefits of a pixel art style.
* The music while not necessarily memorable, is soothing and compliments the overall tone of the game and improves the experience.
* The core driving mechanic is solid and simply works without unnecessary clutter and complication that often muddy similar games.
* A solid story that while basic, serves the nature of the game well. Small details such as messages to NPC's met in past stages solidify the connected nature of the narrative.
Cons:
* A terrible writing font. Given the quality of the pixel art and the title page font, one would be led to believe the quality would carry into the font as well. However, it almost seems as if they developers slapped Times New Roman into a text box and layered it on top of the game for any text they needed. While this may be a symptom of localization and a need for versatility, it is jarring and detracts from the flavor Summer Catchers crafts.
* Questionable RNG hampers the game. You get RNG for incoming hazards, RNG for what tools you can use, etc. It's not the worst RNG, but it does make the game less casual and more frustrating.
* Cannot replay levels/areas. Once you leave/miss them, you'll have to start a new save to get back to them. While this not too difficult, it does mean you can miss content.
* There is no real progression, you cannot get new items that make you fundamentally better such as stat upgrades. You can only get better by getting faster at selecting which tool to use. Which is interesting beacuse there are a significant number of cosmetic upgrades to purchase, so it would have been easy to tie that aspect to strength, but alas.
Is Summer Catchers a bad game? No, it is not. Is it a superb game? Again, no. If there was a "meh" rating on Steam, it would fall squarely into it. However, beacuse of the cute theme and design, coupled with solid if unoriginal core mechanics, Summer Catchers is still a good game to play casually. If you are interested, I would recommend you wait until this game goes on sale to purchase.
6.5/10 -> A cute and solid racing game to play casually.

I've completed the game with a few achievements left behind (screw the co-op ones). That's because once you miss the chance, you can never go back and do them. I guess Devs made it such way so that people can "replay" the game. That would be fine under normal circumstances, but this is kind of a game that I NEVER want to replay.
You need "currency" to buy consumable items to overcome obstacles on your journey, but no matter how familiar you are with the game, you still have to go through all that RNG (mostly obstacles during the race) you've encountered throughout in the 1st run. In other words, even if you start the game all over again because you want to "complete" the game, you can't just breeze though the levels and fill out the missing part. You need to do the EXACT same thing you did in the 1st run;
Collect currency, buy items, race, crash, buy some more, race, crash, complete quest, buy some more, race, fail side quest (which you can never re-do unless you start the game all over again), crash, and buy some more. For the 1st run? That's manageable. Doing the exact same thing on the 2nd run and so on? With no short-cuts and boosts? No thanks. Big time.
Now for the good part. Pixel arts are obviously very good and sparkling, the story is somewhat cute and fits in the game's atmosphere (the ending, though...). Music played the biggest role for me to finish the game. There are some variety of game play elements as well, but those are just side quests so don't expect much (and don't F'em up if you want achievements).
Over all, I enjoyed the game as is despite all the flaws. However, this game does not convince me to play again because of the frustrating aspect this game offers. The most problem I have is about doing the exact same thing on the repeated runs though, so If you don't care much about the repeated game play, then you'd be just fine.

I love everything about this game except the game part itself. Luck plays too much of a role in how things go. It's not that it's hard, I love a challenge. It's just that at times (sometimes too many times) there's nothing that could have been done to not-lose. And I get that MAYBE that was what they intended but that's not a good enough reason for me. I'm playing in hard mode and I've even been considering switching to easier modes just so that I can enjoy everything else more and just move forward instead of being slapped randomly by the game cause I don't see the point, when I win It usually doesn't feel like I did anything better or worse than when I lose. Being able to swap tools makes it a little better but it doesn't refresh quick enough, I can't believe people had to play without that at first. I hope they patch this further.
I still haven't finished the game so I may come to change this review a bit. And I suppose I still do recommend this game cause it's really nice and I like everything else about it but this has annoyed me to the point of writing a review, which I never do.

Pretty fun game. There are some repetitive parts that are really based on chances and can get quite dull. Otherwise, it was really fun playing this game.