DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing

Licensed tie-in games have come a long way since the shovelware garbage we use to get back in the late 90s and early to mid 2000s. Still, these types of games remain a bit of a mixed bag. For every good licensed kart racing game, like Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2 or Hot Wheels Unleashed 2, you have a disaster like Race with Ryan. So when I saw the trailer for DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing, I was cautiously optimistic. After all, DreamWorks has some incredible IPs, and there’s a lot they coul...

Ultimately, DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing gets the job done without excessive amount of effort. There’s more than enough content, but the quality of the racing and its general balance is just not on par with most of the better Mario Kart clones out there, let alone the last episodes of the Nintendo franchise. A handful of cool ideas such as dynamic shortcuts and the Trolls characters giving special characters give the game a little bit of identity, amid the many design and visual elements that ape Mario Kart way too closely at times. But unless you absolutely need a kart racer with the likes...

It’s tough being a kart racer in a world where you will always be compared to the genre’s standard-bearer, but DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing is perfectly serviceable.

If you’re hankering for a new kart racing game, DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing will do the job. It’s a solid enough game, offering a good selection of unique tracks and some much-loved characters. There’s plenty of single-player content to keep you busy too, and split screen play is always entertaining if you have a couple of friends to hand. But like any karting game, the on-track action is often too frustrating to be fun, and I’m not getting over the criminally bad voice acting any time soon.

Dreamworks All-Star Kart Racing is a better kart racer than you’re probably expecting, but its low production values mean it can’t come close to Nintendo’s genre-defining franchise.