Coffin Dodgers, a racing game with old people. Doesn’t that sound funny to you? Well it should, the premise of this game is that the grim reaper visits 7 old people in Sunny Pines, a retirement village. These 7 people will die in three days. However, they think that their time has not yet come. The old folks gather and come up with a plan. They decide to challenge Death to a race with their old-people-scooters. Amused by this idea Death agrees.
There are 3 different settings and a final showdown. In the first 3 stages, you have to complete 3 races in each one. You have to beat the other old people in order to stay alive. After each stage Death claims the life or lives of the lowest placed elders. At the end, you get the showdown in which you have to place in the top 3 and then you get to keep living for a while at least.
You get to choose between 7 characters with each their own scooter and backstory. After each race you get some currency, with this currency you can go to the garage and upgrade your scooter, giving it a better engine to increase your top speed or a new gearbox to improve your acceleration. The Races itself are very similar to Mario Kart races. You start with a countdown, while this countdown is happening you can start to push the throttle to receive a head start.
On the way you get to pick up power-ups, this can be a set of missiles to fire off at the elderly in front of you, a gun to shoot, an EMP to temporarily disable nearby scooters, a bubble to protect yourself from your opponents and oil that you can drop to make others slip into it later (a bit like the banana in Mario Kart). Next, to that you can melee attack others who are very close to you. This melee attack is chargeable when fully charged you knock your target off his scooter and force him to reset. If not fully charged they get stunned for a short time.
This game was released almost 3 years ago on Steam, Xbox One and PS4 now coming to the Switch. The good part of this game is that it is funny, and you get to play split screen. One big issue with the split screen on the Switch is that you cannot use both of your joy cons separately. The controls, however, aren’t too complicated that they require both joy cons. So, it should’ve been possible to implement the possibility to use both joy cons to play with someone else on the couch without having to buy a second set of controllers.
Because of the aforementioned reason and the fact that feels a bit too much like Mario Kart, it will not score high in my opinion. The game has its funny elements, however, once you’re playing they don’t really come back. The tracks are well built and look very good and this is a big redeeming factor. Another weird thing is that you get extra experience points for doing stuff wrong. If you hit obstacles you get XP points which is a bit weird but not something that takes away from this game.
There is one other major issue with this game. Once you get into first place there’s not much your opponents can do about it. If you get out of the (very short) range of the gun and missiles than you just cannot lose the game anymore unless you drive into a wall and get stuck. This is why the Blue Shell in Mario Kart is so important to the game, it gives you a chance to beat someone out of your range. If you want to play a fun racing game alone or with friends, I would still recommend playing Mario Kart over this one.
