Welcome back to Save State, where launch lineups thankfully have convenient racing games to play. The Nintendo Switch 2 is out, which means it’s time to check what cheap and interesting titles are out there. If I had a nickel for every time a game from Shin’en’s Fast series was a launch title for a Nintendo Switch, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it sure is weird it’s happened twice. Fast Fusion, the latest anti-gravity racing game from Shin’en, is heavily inspired by a title that’s near and dear to my heart, F-Zero GX. Which, if you haven’t heard, I’m a pretty big fan of F-Zero GX and anything else like it.

Fast Fusion is an anti-gravity racer, which is to say, it’s a racing game where you pilot machines that hover on the track at breakneck speeds and can boost your vehicle to go even faster. It controls like a nice mixture of F-Zero GX and Wipeout, where you can maneuver your vehicle with the left analog stick, but can strafe using shoulder buttons to angle yourself better or take turns more fluidly. One shakeup that Fusion has, versus Fast RMX which launched with the Nintendo Switch in 2017, is that you can press a button to jump into the air at any moment, which is excellent for finding shortcuts, boost energy, or just getting away from your competition.

Fast Fusion has a phase shifting mechanic due to boost panels that are on the ground of many of its tracks. You can shift between blue and orange with the touch of a button and touching a boost panel of the corresponding color will send you catapulting ahead. There are also boost zones and hoops you can jump through which may be color coded as well. Touching a blue boost panel when you’re in orange phase will dramatically slow you down, so it’s important to pay attention to which phase your vehicle is in so you can stay ahead of the pack.

There are tokens hovering above the track you can collect which regenerate your boost meter, and knowing when to boost, as well as when to make your vehicle jump off the track, are incredibly important for securing first place. Boosting at the right time can knock your opponents off balance and cause them to spin out, which can help you get ahead. The way Fast Fusion handles boosting is always a joy because the sheer sense of speed the game instills in the player by zooming out the camera and warping the image really gives you the idea that you’re blazing along at an incredible pace.

There are multiple modes in which you can enjoy anti-gravity hijinks: Championship, the most standard mode, has three separate difficulty levels for four cups, each with three tracks. The Super Hero mode from Fast RMX returns here, which is a fun mode of single races where your boost gauge is the same as your health, like F-Zero, and you can’t crash at all or you’re out of the race. Time Attack and local multiplayer modes are also available, though you technically can play online with the Switch 2 game share feature. Game sharing with a friend to play this way was actually a better experience than I thought it would be, as it introduced a little input delay, but nothing as egregious as Smash Bros Ultimate’s online.

The only real downside to Fast Fusion is that, like many of these games with speed or engine cc options, the “difficulty” level is directly related to how fast you move. Subsonic is the first difficulty you get to play, and you have to earn enough cash by playing the courses in order to unlock Supersonic and Hypersonic difficulties. Supersonic and Hypersonic are, simply put, straight up more fun than the novice Subsonic difficulty because you move considerably faster and can therefore take more daring risks for shortcuts on the tracks. Learning how to make smaller adjustments so you can clear corners easier or line up for boost pads feels rewarding no matter the difficulty level, but the second and third speeds are far and away the best parts of the experience.

The fusion mechanic of Fast Fusion is really neat as well, since you can spend your hard-earned winnings on unlocking new machines to race with when you’re not unlocking new cups or difficulty levels. You can combine machines to boost their respective stats like acceleration, top speed, and boost, and fusing them together causes the final result to take elements from each of the crafts you merged. What’s really cool about this is that some fusions have higher stat boosts than others, and even the order in which you select vehicles can influence the final result, giving many more potential combinations for you to use!

Fast Fusion is a real solid attempt to evoke F-Zero GX nostalgia, even going so far as to use the same announcer as the aforementioned 2003 GameCube classic. There are a lot of vehicles to unlock, fusions to experiment with, and different difficulties to try, but the number of tracks is a little sparse compared to the previous title in the series, Fast RMX. Of course, the majority of tracks in RMX were borrowed from its previous entry on the Wii U, while Fusion has 12 new and original courses on which you can race. Of course, by the time this column goes live, the first update for Fusion will be out that adds three new tracks and a new video rendering mode.

There are a number of video settings you can change with performance, quality, and balanced settings. I chose to play on balanced, but it’s nice to have the options available. There is also a rendering mode without any upscaling that’s being added in a free update, for those who don’t enjoy DLSS smears, but as of this writing that update isn’t out yet so I can’t say much on it. This is also the update that will add three new tracks to Fast Fusion, increasing the total number of tracks to 15. Finally, it goes without saying: the music in Fast Fusion is pretty solid, with great electronica backing tracks with powerful beats and thundering bass. Crank up your subwoofers- canonically, every racer in this title is blasting this OST at max volume.

That being said, I think this is a reasonable time to bring this entry of Save State to a supersonic close. Remember, it’s actually a terrible idea to feed your hedgehog chili dogs. Don’t believe their lies, or you’ll have a vet bill on your hands. See you again in two weeks!