Announced during The Game Awards 2025, the Screamer release date is set for March 26, 2026. It’s a reboot of a series originally developed by Milestone back in 1995 when they were called Graffiti, and mixes street racing action with elements of classic Japanese role-playering games (JRPGs).
What this means is that you’ll be immersed in an illegal street racing tournament involving five rival teams made up of a leader and two members, with a narrative weaving throughout the whole cast, and more than 30 minutes of anime-style cut scenes created by Polygon Pictures, and voiced by actors including Troy Baker and Aleks Le.
Whether or not you’re enticed by the anime and JRPG aspects of Screamer, it’s good to see a racing game doing things differently. The closest comparison in current maintstream racing games would be JDM: Japanese Drift Master, which combines realistic cars and visuals with an open world driving experience and a story revealed in manga pages rather than anime videos.
It’s probably also a welcome change for Milestone after almost entirely working on licensed franchises for the last quarter of a century (MotoGP, Hot Wheels, Supercross and Motocross, along with RIDE).
What will probably make or break the game is that the gameplay mechanics are based around a Twin Stick control system and a promised seamless blend of racing and fighting actions with an Echo System connecting narrative and gameplay to generate and use Sync and Entropy to fuel their attacks and defenses.
From a racing point of view, the use of twin stick controls makes me thing of Inertial Drift, originally released in 2020, which was fun to mess around with, but not something I found particularly engaging to drive. Which doesn’t mean it can’t work for Screamer, but could appeal more to gamers in general than racing game enthusiasts.
A new story trailer has also been released to show more of the narrative elements.
It’s a fairly tall order to combine the fun of a pure arcade racing game like Ridge Racer, with a great fighting game (as one example I really enjoyed, 2022’s Sifu). If Milestone can pull it off, then it could be the start of an interesting new genre mixing driving action with other action game elements.
You can also wishlist Screamer (2026) already on Steam, here. Or on the PlayStation Store for the PS5, and the Microsoft Store for the Xbox Series X|S. And you’ll be able to keep up with the latest Screamer news, release dates and more, here.
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