Teamwork makes the uh.. nevermind.
Last October, I checked out Bamtang’s Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway and found it to be a marginal improvement over the previous entries in the series. Now, almost exactly a year later, Bamtang is back on the racing circuit with that of Dreamworks All-Star Kart Racing, a more trimmed-down kart racer than Slime Speedway and one that feels bland and soulless around every corner.
With the release of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, it’s become pretty clear that Gamemill has small studios pushing out quick-to-cash releases that feel underbaked and disappointingly low-budget. While the previous Nickelodeon racers were not great by any means, they improved with each iteration and started to show promise. Sadly, that promise doesn’t seem to have transferred over to All-Star Kart Racing as it feels like a step back from where Bamtang had been heading with its Nickelodeon racing series. Can it be fun to at least race? Sure, but when everything else surrounding it is extremely lacking? Well, there are better options out there.
Dreamworks isn’t a stranger to joining in on the racing genre as they have done so before with 2011’s Dreamworks Super Star Kartz which appeared on pretty much every console and handheld of that era. However, since that time, Dreamworks has released nearly two dozen films from Rise of the Guardians, The Croods, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Turbo, and Ruby Gilman: Teenage Kraken, movies that contain characters that are surprisingly not present here. It's almost as if the bulk of this cast is from a decade ago.
Instead, Dreamworks All-Star Kart Racing plays it extremely safe despite a few odd choices in its roster. You have notable favorites in Shrek and Kungfu Panda, to How to Train Your Dragon, Boss Baby, Trolls, Bad Guys, and even Megamind, voiced by Nolan North no less. However, while the bulk of the main characters from Trolls are part of some of the game’s mechanics, the use of Bridget here is a bizarre one, as is her voice direction, which might be the worst voiced character I’ve ever heard, regardless of the medium. It's that bad, and to be honest, almost all the voices are just not great.
Across the selection of various Dreamworks films, All-Star Kart Racing only features 22 characters, a massive step back from Slime Speedway as you had 40 playable racers to choose from, not to mention the whole Pit Crew mechanic as well, allowing the Nickelodeon brand to really be presented well. With only half the playable cast, you really are limited in what you have access to, especially as a good cropping of modern Dreamworks characters are not represented here. Considering the audience for this game is likely young kids, their modern favorites are nowhere to be found.
The slim cast also translates into what you have on offer. Single-player has the most content available, as apart from the standard cups and free races, you have challenges and time trial modes as well. Otherwise, both solo and multiplayer options consist of six cups of four races, with the final cup being a collection of four existing tracks, making only five cups consisting of completely unique courses.
Those courses consist of Panda Village, Africa, Greater Los Angeles, Spirit Realm, New Berk, New York City Zoo, Pop Village, Hidden World, The Acorn Center, Arctic Ocean, Shrek’s Swamp, Baby Corp, Dark Forest, Museum of Fine Arts, Bergen Town, San Ricardo, Far Far Away, Gongmen City, Galactic Sky, and Dragon’s Keep, While several of these environments do sell their property well enough, some feel drastically generic and feel like they are ripping off courses from Mario Kart as we have two tracks in Galactic Sky and the Spirit Realm being this game’s Rainbow Road as well as Dragon’s Keep taking over the role of Bowser’s Castle. Mario Kart’s influence is so drastically present that this game can almost feel like plagiarism.
All-Star Kart Racing is as typical as it gets for its overall gameplay. You’ll have item boxes to gather up upon each lap, the ability to drift around each corner, as well as the boosts that come from holding it down. There are jumps and trick jumps that occur when you get the timing right, to bumping into other racers that reward the heavier kart. Races begin with a variation of the Dreamworks logo that can trigger a perfect start boost, to boost and drift pads that populate each course. All of this is pretty standard fare with very little being added to really make this racer stand out.
The main gimmick offered to All-Star Kart Racing are Troll surprises. These technically act like a second item more so than anything substantial. These range from leaving a slippery trail of soap bubbles, a boost that provides a copy of the item you are currently holding, to a bug that can attract all the musical notes around you, which is how you power up your Troll surprise. You also have magical lyres that can trigger a magical path that is something of a shortcut without really feeling like you are gaining the lead.
Items themselves tend to be the same song and dance we’ve seen before with few that really help out in the standard races, largely due to the base difficulty being far too easy. From a guitar that will populate the track with more musical notes to pick up, to other items that tend to follow in the banana peel and blue shell concepts with raw fish and the swarm of brainbots. There is also a hook item that is fine for what it is, but one challenge in the challenge mode mentions that each player has a hook but in actuality, they have Kai’s Swords, which feels like a typo more so than anything. On that note, I never once obtained the actual hook. Not once.
The Troll gimmick presented here also adds a Troll as the host of that track. Delta Dawn will grant more item boxes on the course, Trollzart with more ramps, King Quincy with more bumpers, King Trollex with more boost pads, and Barb with more rock hazards. These don’t really tend to affect gameplay in the ways I think Bamtang was gunning for. Each kart racer tends to have its own gimmick, but this is one of the most disappointing ones I’ve seen in a while. It’s a shame the Trolls were not sidekicks on the kart themselves, hosting a different weapon arsenal between them, allowing them to be more impactful on the actual gameplay.
Scattered across each course are collectibles—these range from a baby bottle to Hiccup’s helmet to a flip phone and a dumpling. Apart from being a JPEG in a collectibles screen, I don’t know their purpose. They don’t seem to unlock anything or anything that feels like they are worth getting than earning an achievement for likely collecting them all. Each collectible is tied to its driver, so there are 22 to track down, should you feel the need to.
Each cup has its own difficulty setting from Relaxed to Regular, to Turbo and Lightning, should you feel the need to make the game more challenging for some reasons, but it feels more like allowing the CPU to be unnaturally fast instead of really relying on your skills to see the race through, especially as the rubberbanding is some of the worst I've ever seen. Challenges seem to play out in Regular difficulty, but it isn’t clear if that is the case as some racers, like Megamind feel far too fast to really make it a fair try, especially for younger players trying to unlock the whole cast. Seriously, he is a nightmare.
As you complete each cup, you’ll earn a variety of car parts as well as a few racers, with the Challenge mode granting you access to the final selection of six characters. One important thing to note about the car parts is that you don’t actually earn those parts via the cups, you earn the right to purchase them with the Note currency you earn through these races. Considering the effort you have to go through to unlock these parts, it’s a grindy move to then apply a purchase system as that extra step. Thankfully, the parts earned in the Challenge mode seem to be readily available.
The Challenge mode has you completing tasks such as using certain mechanics to hit racers with particular weapons. None of them are terribly hard, but the races that unlock that challenge host can feel largely unfair, especially the race against Megamind, as I have mentioned, who feels far too fast given the racer you are forced to use. Thankfully, you only need to complete four of the five challenges per tier in order to face the boss, allowing you to skip a potentially difficult challenge.
Once you have completed the entire challenge circuit, as well as completed all of the cups, you’ll then have access to the entire roster. This is comprised of Shrek, Master Shifu, Po, Mr. Wolf, Alex, Theodore Templeton, Bridget, Tigress, King Gristle, Fiona, Donkey, Tina Templeton, Astrid, Diane Foxington, Hiccup, Kitty Softpaws, King Julien, Puss in Boots, Wolf, Grand Master Oogway, Lord Farquaad, and finally, Megamind. Why we have Bridget and King Gristle instead of Poppy and Branch are weird choices, especially as Poppy is even featured on the cover of the game.
And while each character is voiced, very few even sound like their counterparts. I will say that the actor who portrays Po is a dead-ringer for Jack Black and does a fantastic job. This caused me to use Po often as every other character, such as Mr. Wolf, and Hiccup, feature some incredibly annoying voice lines that repeat far too often. Mr. Wolf has this “Wahooooohhooooooooooooo!!!” line that is screamed at least a dozen times per lap. Bridget is another character who I had to mute my tv as I just couldn’t stand her. She has a voice line that sounds like she swallowed the mic while scresming that is ear-shattering.
Each character also has their own stats, allowing you to pick a racer that fits your playstyle. Po and the titular Boss Baby are the fastest racers, whereas Master Shifu and Alex have the best handling. However, given the repeated voice lines and pretty lacking impersonations, you might end up choosing a racer that simply doesn’t annoy you. Given that All-Star Kart Racing is designed primarily with kids in mind, they likely will pick their favorites and rarely feel the need to change it up.
Character models and environments also feel noticeably low-end here with each member of the roster feeling like they have been ripped out of a late Xbox 360 release, complete with vacant eyes and some pretty low-poly frames. While their karts do fare better as they pull from their various films, you can customize the chassis, tires, engine, and spoiler, giving you a bit of flexibility in their look, but ultimately, the stat changes don’t really matter too much unless you are playing on the harder difficulties.
As I had access to All-Star Kart Racing prior to launch, I couldn’t find a single match to play online to test its servers. You can take on a series of cups or a single race, but not a single soul was playing this. There are race points as well as you start with 1000, but there isn’t any indication on what the points actually mean. Thankfully, if you have any friends you want to play this with, there are private matches and split-screen multiplayer as well, giving you some flexibility on your multiplayer options, should you actually convince anyone you know to actually play this.
With Slime Speedyway, I feel Bamtang had started to find their footing on making an enjoyable kart racer, even if their use of the licence still felt somewhat limiting. However, All-Star Racing feels like we are back to square one with a game that clearly didn’t have the development time or budget to really stand out. Given that kart racers are a dime a dozen now, especially with the freely available Disney Speedstorm, which absolutely kicks ass, All-Star Kart Racing just doesn’t justify the need to exist. It’s bland, largely boring, and is nothing more than a copy of the standard systems and mechanics found in every single kart racer. If history repeats itself, and it usually does, then All-Star Kart Racing 3 is where I’ll start to pay attention.
Developer - Bamtang Games. Publisher - Gamemill Entertainment. Released - November 3rd, 2023. Available On - Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4/PS5, Nintendo Switch, PC. Rated - (E) Mild Fantasy Violence.
Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.