Smash Kart Racing

For the fans of top-down driving games you must add this game to your collection.

Smash Kart Racing is one part Mario Kart, two parts Mini Car Racing and all round fun!

Although you don’t have the instantly recognisable characters you would get from Nintendo’s catalogue, you will soon get to love or loathe the characters on offer in this game – and you’re quite spoilt for choice! Ranging from a monkey, polar bear, mad scientist, cowboy or cute girl (to name just a few), you can sense the makers really went to town to make this game quirky and memorable.

First things first, once you’ve managed to find the character to get behind the wheel with, you have the option to have a quick game – which gives you a fun challenge and short race against the other opponents to come first after three laps.

You have three worlds to conquer (Paradise Island, Iceberg and Alien World) with four tracks on each to compete for first place in - which gives the game quite a good shelf-life. If this isn’t enough for you, there are also three different levels of difficulty to make it even more challenging and rewarding.

For additional challenges you can try your hand at a cup race. This uses the same courses as in the quick game but an additional six more (making it nine fun-packed courses in total)! The difficulty of these courses increase with every new world you try and overcome. The aim of this cup game is to get as many points as you can (i.e. come 1^st more than the others overall) and you will be rewarded by unlocking the next world and its courses. In these cup races, you will not just be challenged by the traits in each world – be it slippery ice, tricky jumps, sharp chicanes or testing your endurance as you try to stay on top after 10 laps, but the tricky way to avoid being knocked off-course by your competitors.

The last game mode available is the ‘hot seat’, which allows you to challenge your friends around the course taking it in turns to get the best time. You are able to have up to six race the course in turn for the top podium position. Naturally, unless you all have the game to play on and have studied the course well, you have a distinct advantage over the others. But, and there is a huge but, this is a pretty unpredictable game and due to your competitors taking their turns to knock you off the circuit, your pole position’s anything but assured!

By driving round the course in any of the races you get various power-ups to collect along the way. You get hurricanes, missiles, blades, shields, giant snowballs, autopilot and slippery oil to help make the game even less predictable and entertaining. For all those classic gamers who enjoy a simple and tricky game to get to grips with and that high level of unpredictability which helps keep the game addictive well passed bedtime, then this game is certainly great value for money.

Game rating 85%

Positives

Quick to get started and very addictive

Nice power-ups offer more playability

Cute graphics

Challenging and lots of courses to keep it fresh

Intuitive controls

Negatives

Fairly repetitive, once you’ve seen the main courses, there’s not much difference.

The power-ups would have been fun if you could select it.

The music is not connected to the action on screen and no sound effects.