Samsung TV / game / BIONIC RACE 2026
REVIEW
Bionic Race 2026 wants to be your couch arcade, and almost makes it.
A neon-soaked futuristic racer built for Samsung TVs. The handling is light, the tracks are loud, and the remote-control input ceiling is the real opponent.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
Tizen’s games row is a strange neighbourhood. Most of what lives there is either a very old port, a very loud casino app, or a phone-first arcade title trying to figure out what to do with a TV remote. Bionic Race 2026 is firmly in the third camp — a neon, bloom-heavy futuristic racer that wants to be your ten-minute distraction between streaming sessions.
The good news is it knows what it is. Boot it up and you’re in a race inside thirty seconds, no account, no tutorial, no battle pass screen. The bad news is the same thing every TV racer eventually runs into: a directional pad is a blunt instrument, and a game built around drifting and boost timing needs more nuance than the Samsung clicker can give it. You end up memorising track geometry instead of driving.
What’s left is a competent, shallow arcade racer that earns its place as a casual lean-back option and not much more. It’s the kind of app you install on a Friday, beat in two evenings, and forget about by the next firmware update — which, for a free TV game, isn’t the worst outcome.
Bionic Race 2026 is what happens when a phone-grade arcade racer is asked to live on a 65-inch screen with a clicker.
FEATURES
Bionic Race 2026 is a third-person futuristic racer with a small handful of tracks, a roster of hover-style cars with cosmetic skins, and a single-player career that gates faster vehicles behind in-game currency. Steering is bound to the Samsung TV remote's directional pad, with a separate button for boost and another for drift. There is no gamepad pairing dialog in the version we tested, so the d-pad is effectively the only input.
Sessions are short — most races land between 90 seconds and two minutes — and the game leans on a points-based progression loop rather than online multiplayer. Audio is heavy on synth-arcade stings; visuals lean into bloom, lens flare, and the genre's standard purple-and-cyan palette. The app launches into a full-screen attract loop and quits cleanly back to the Tizen home row.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pitch is clear and the game commits to it. From the menu screen you know exactly what you're getting: an arcade racer, fast laps, no tutorials to skip. For a free-to-try TV game that has to work the second a casual viewer thumbs into it, that legibility matters more than depth.
Performance on a 2024-era Samsung panel is steady. Frame pacing holds during boost stretches, the HUD reads from across a living room, and the soundtrack is loud enough to feel like an arcade cabinet without drowning the engine cues. The download is small and the install-to-first-race time is short — the kind of friction budget a TV game has to respect.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The remote is the ceiling. Racing games live or die on input fidelity, and a clicker with no analog axis flattens every corner into the same binary turn. There is real fun buried in the drift mechanic, but you can't feather it, which means most podium finishes come from memorising track layouts rather than driving better. Pairing a Bluetooth gamepad would change the review; the option doesn't appear to be wired up.
The track count is thin and the AI rubber-bands hard, which makes the career loop feel padded rather than progressed. There's nothing genuinely broken here — it's just that the racing-on-Tizen genre as a whole is still figuring out what it wants to be, and Bionic Race 2026 doesn't push that conversation forward.
CONCLUSION
Install it for a quiet weeknight when the living room wants something dumb and bright on the screen. Don't expect it to replace a console racer, and don't expect to come back to it in a month. If the developer ships gamepad support and a few more tracks, this jumps a full point.