Cult classic racing series returns 18 years after its once-final entry on Xbox 360 to 95% overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews

Cult classic street racing series Tokyo Xtreme Racer has just made a comeback after nearly two decades of dormancy, and this new entry is already a major hit among racing fans. Days after its Early Access release, it’s racked up a pile of glowing responses from Steam players.

This new Tokyo Xtreme Racer is a single-player affair whose basic pitch you can probably guess from the title: it’s an arcade racer set in the streets of Tokyo. Since its Early Access launch on January 23, Steam user reviewers have been impressed with the driving action, the volume of content, and the lack of microtransactions.

In just a handful of days, Tokyo Xtreme Racer has garnered 4,814 user reviews on Steam, 95% of which are positive. According to the Steam 250 ranking algorithm, that makes it the fourth-best game of 2025 so far, just behind underground hits like My Summer Car and Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist.

And hopefully, the Early Access launch means the game’s just going to get better. Right now, the game’s only playable up to the halfway point of the story, and the devs plan to incorporate player feedback that comes through in the roughly four months leading up to the 1.0 release.

“Since this is the first time in over 18 years that Tokyo Xtreme Racer will be returning, we felt it would be best to launch the game in Early Access to do justice to the franchise,” the devs explain on the Steam page. “A lot has changed in the genre since Tokyo Xtreme Racer was around, and we believe it’s just as important to collect feedback not only from the fans that have stuck with the franchise, but also from racing game fans in general. “

The Tokyo Xtreme Racer lineage actually goes back to the SNES days, though we wouldn’t get an official English-language release until Tokyo Highway Battle on PS1. Much of the series was released worldwide on the Dreamcast and PS2, but the final entry, known as Import Tuner Challenge in English, would hit Xbox 360 in 2006. While a handful of mobile spin-offs would fill the intervening years, the mainline series had been dormant for decades. But after all these years, it seems the wait was worthwhile.

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