It is a truth universally acknowledged that a developer in possession of a stylish new arcade racer must be in want of some difficulty patches. Screamer, the anime-flavoured reboot that launched this week alongside Digital Deluxe pre-order access, had reviewers finding it a delightfully exaggerated arcade racer that in its story-based Tournament mode sometimes became randomly, viciously hard for no readily apparent reason.
Milestone, the Italian developer, clearly took the feedback to heart. The game's first update, which launched alongside the general availability period, has tweaked AI behaviours in various events to bring them closer to the intended difficulty, while announcing a future balance pass for the game's difficulty settings. Translation: controller-throwers everywhere can take a measured breath.
Where the Difficulty Actually Lives
The thing about Screamer is that its problems were never about being hard, exactly. Several reviewers loved the core racing. The game offers robust offline difficulty options and even lets players adjust the game speed of offline races to as low as 50 per cent. What rankled was something stranger: artificial constraints that made certain races feel deliberately unfair.
According to Rock Paper Shotgun's review, the issue wasn't CPU driver skill so much as sometimes contradictory objectives set for Tournament mode stages, where players are somehow expected to both charge ahead for a first-place finish while also hanging back deep enough to collect however many combat knockouts and skill deployments. That design tension is structural, not something a simple AI tweak fixes. Which suggests Milestone's "additional balance pass" will need to dig deeper.
The Style Was Never in Question
What is worth noting is the gap between Screamer's critical reception and its difficulty complaints. Multiple reviewers have called it a marvellous arcade racer with all the core elements of a modern classic: a meaty single-player campaign with rich story, fantastic sense of style, a snappy arcade-style driving model with high skill ceiling, and plenty of content in both local and online play. The visuals, the writing, the unconventional dual-stick control scheme, the eclectic international cast: all of it landed.
The game currently sits at 77 per cent positive reviews on Steam from its early access period. That score reflects a game people want to love, frustrated by specific design decisions rather than fundamental flaws. A patch that smooths out those decision points could nudge it significantly higher.
What the Update Actually Addresses
The patch also extends beyond difficulty matters, adding new poses and mouth flaps to the visual novel-style chats and arguments that punctuate Tournament races, as well as revamped dialogue for one storyline that aims to provide better clarity in the succession of events. There are UI tweaks and more varied background music as well.
More meaningfully for Deck owners, Screamer has won full Steam Deck Verified status. That's a practical win for a narrative-heavy game that works nicely in portable form.
The Bigger Picture
Screamer comes from Milestone, a studio best known for competent but ultimately safe motorcycle games like MotoGP and Ride. After finding success with Hot Wheels Unleashed, the game feels like a racing title the team always wanted to make with full creative freedom, harking back to an experimental era when developers and publishers weren't afraid to take risks, resulting in titles like Split/Second and Blur that dared to be different.
That's the real story here: not that Screamer has a difficulty problem, but that it exists at all. Developers rarely bet on stylised, story-first arcade racers anymore. When they do, and when they land as solidly as Screamer has on most fronts, the responsible move is to listen when players point out where the experience breaks down. Milestone is doing that. Whether the upcoming balance pass proves sufficient will determine whether this reboot becomes a lasting success or remains a fascinating experiment that nearly pulled it off.