Micro Machines has a long history in video games, but it's the original top-down racer — which first launched in 1991 and subsequently came to virtually every 90s gaming platform — that's most fondly remembered. World Series is Codemasters' attempt to tap into that iconic design while also imbuing it with the character-focused online fun of competitive games like Overwatch. Unfortunately, it fails on both fronts.

At its core the racing in World Series feels similar to the original, with the wide-drifting and easily scattered cars zooming around the household-themed tracks just like real life Micro Machines might. Fun as that simple premise could be, though, the game seems determined to keep players from enjoying it.

You can choose between racing or battling, either on your own against AI, with friends in very limited local multiplayer or in an online ranked mode. In battle, each car has its own personality and special abilities, and matches progress like a team-based online shooter might. You play your role depending on your car (the spy is stealthy and deadly, the ambulance is a healer, etc) and build up to your ultimate abilities as you infiltrate and defend. But controlling these cars is way too imprecise for anything other than careening around at top speed, making the objective-based play incredibly frustrating.

In race mode, the special abilities are replaced by homogenising power-ups, with skillful racing rarely being enough to keep you out in front. The constant scrum of cars mixed with the explosive power-ups and myriad falling hazards means even the cleanest racing will inevitably see you undone and forced back to somewhere near last place. Where you end up placing feels due entirely to luck, which might be OK if you were having fun racing your friends. But you're probably not. 

With the game lacking the various vehicle types, long list of stages and single-player Challenge mode of the original, all the emphasis is on the multiplayer, making the relative impossibility of playing with other people is biggest issue here. As mentioned earlier local multiplayer is extremely limited and uninteresting, consisting of an elimination mode for racing and a small-scale battle arena. Both are claustrophobic and scrappy, as the game does not support split screen.

Worse, I played through dozens of online matches and the game struggled to fill the match with players every single time. This means each brief race was preceded by minutes of fruitless searching, with the end result seeing me pitted against a squad of AI (and maybe one human opponent) anyway.

Even if this was Rocket League or Overwatch, where the core experience is fun enough to motivate me to keep coming back, I probably wouldn't tolerate such a desolate online game. If you have friends who also have the game you can link up online, but unless you have a lot of friends who want to jump in you'll face the same issues.

The biggest shame is that there is plenty of stuff here that I can see working if the overall execution was better. Playing ranked battles earns you points that unlocks loot boxes, which in turn randomly drop new paint-jobs and voice lines for the vehicles, for example, which is the kind of motivation that really works in the games World Tour was clearly inspired by. Plus the actual driving and many of the track designs are fun, or at least I imagine they would be in more interesting or better balanced game modes.

It's possible that some post-release updates will fix the online issues with the game, but it's hard to believe the more central problems could be alleviated. There's a kernel of a good idea in transforming Micro Machines into charming personalities that each have their own special skills they can use to work together, but if there's a way to jam that complex, strategic online play into the zany, top-down design of 26 years ago, this game isn't it.

Micro Machines World Tour is out now for PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One and PC.