Smash Kart Racing

Remember that smart, confident, unflappable guy at school who regularly produced exemplary work? Well he couldn't get it right all the time. Nobody can. A couple of times, he surprised everybody by turning in work that was average.

Meet Smash Kart Racing. It’s by Digital Chocolate, that purveyor of consistently well designed, polished and fun mobile games. Smash Kart Racing is its once-in-a-blue-moon slip.

And yet the foundation is there for a typically classy game.

This is a colourfully presented, simple-to-play racer centred on the sort of fantastical karting experience we’ve seen before in Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart and, of course, Mario Kart.

The key difference here is that the action is viewed from a fixed top-down perspective, so judging your lefts and your rights is an early challenge if you’ve never played this sort of racer before.

The best way to look at it is that ‘Right’ on the D-pad turns you clockwise, while ‘Left’ turns you anti-clockwise. With acceleration automatically handled, that leaves ‘Up’ to activate your constantly charging Nitro boost, ‘Down’ to apply the brakes and ‘OK’ to launch the obligatory power-ups once collected from around the tracks.

Prior to joining the action, you pick from eight oddball characters (robots and monkeys and polar bears, oh my) before joining five other racers on the grids of tracks set in tropical, icy and spacey environments.

The main mode in the game is Cup, which sets you off on a series of increasingly difficult competitions, featuring four races each. Each race awards you points according to your finishing position, with even the dunce in last place acquiring a solitary point to their name.

With the admirably unpredictable AI, that means that you can conceivably win a cup competition without coming first once.

In the early stages, once you’ve got used to the slippery controls, you’ll probably start enjoying Smash Kart Racing quite a lot. The AI is likeably chaotic, and just as prone to pratfalls as you are, and the constant supply of Nitros and on-track speed boosts means that you’re rarely completely out of a race. We experienced a fair few final-corner victories by throwing caution to the wind on the final lap.

Problems arise as the tracks become more complex. Some of the trickier tracks really expose the slidey controls as inadequate for a tight karting game. As the tracks narrow and become ever twistier, you find yourself snagging on roadside obstacles, or being sent careening off-course by the smallest of bumps. It then takes far to long to reset you to the track.

Some kind of signposting for the corners would also have been a good idea, as the view isn’t quite zoomed out enough to grant you an acceptable amount of reaction time when approaching a tight turn. This means that success swiftly descends into a little too much trial and error, requiring you to learn the course layout by heart before you’re able to complete an entire lap without spinning off.

With no race-restart option in the Cup competitions, that means either an irritating quit-out of the game or accepting a poor final position. That’s fine for hard-core gamers, but everything else about the game (and Digital Chocolate’s track record) screams casual accessibility.

Then there are the rough edges that contribute to the feeling that Smash Kart Racing was perhaps released a little hastily. When you finish the race, the camera scrolls across the track slowly, but we found that the racers were rather oddly dragged with it, like a giant electro magnet had been activated on the edge of the track.

In addition, there are fairly frequent cases of slow-down on the more elaborate tracks. Given that such tracks are already painfully tricky to negotiate, such a technical issue can prove catastrophic to your chances of success. We also noticed absolutely crippling slow-down when we returned to the game from quitting out to, say, read a text message.

Smash Kart Racing’s technical issues, when combined with the poor tuning of the handling model and the spiky difficulty level, undermine what could so easily have been another winner from the Digital Chocolate stable. With an extra few weeks of fine tuning and balancing we would probably have been commending the developers on a job well done.

As it is, Smash Kart Racing is a fun but flawed kart racer recommended only for the patient and forgiving among you.