Nickelodeon Kart Racers, a videogame title that is self-explanatory for anyone that has played videogames at some point in their life. It’s a kart racing game themed around the Nickelodeon television channel and its cartoon shows. Obviously aimed towards children, the developer didn’t put that much effort into making an actually good racing game, but boy oh boy, they could at least have TRIED.
The gameplay of Nickelodeon Kart Racers is mostly a poor attempt at copying the solid gameplay mechanics of the Mario Kart series. You choose one of the characters to race with, modify their car to tweak their performance and compete against other racers on themed tracks. Drifting earns you boost energy to temporarily drive faster and you can pick up items that can either slow down your opponents or protect you from any incoming attacks. But Mario Kart is not the only videogame series Nickelodeon Kart Racers is copying inspired by, as it also blatantly copies implements mechanics from other racing games, such as F-Zero and Sonic All-Stars Racing. You can drive over puddles of green slime to charge up your boost meter, just as in F-Zero, and transform into either a plane or boat to race on different types of terrains, similar to Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. Solid mechanics in their own games, but poorly designed in Nickelodeon Kart Racers. But why exactly is this game so poorly designed?
For starters, the amount of characters you can play with is embarrassingly low. To make it worse, they only cover four of Nickelodeon’s vast amount of cartoon shows. You can choose Spongebob, Patrick, and Sandy from Spongebob Squarepants; Tommy, Angelica, and Reptar from Rugrats; Arnold and Helga from Hey Arnold!; and Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Mikey from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If you grew up watching Nickelodeon, you’re probably wondering why there are no characters from Fairly Odd Parents, Danny Phantom and other hit cartoon shows of the channel. Even its most critically acclaimed show, Avatar: The Last Airbender, isn’t in this game. I personally don’t mind that since such a wonderful cartoon series shouldn’t be in tripe like this, but it does show how weak the character selection is. To make things worse, the characters that are included are basically reskins from each other. Each car drives the same and the characters don’t have any voice lines that they shout while they’re racing. The game does display some of their catchphrases every now and then, but since you’re focussed on driving your car, you easily miss the sentences displayed at the bottom of the screen. There’s literally no reason to choose a specific character, other than he/she is part of your favorite cartoon show.
Getting back to the gameplay, it’s simply not fun to play this game. The drifting mechanic, for example, forces you to drive in an almost straight line instead of giving you more control over how you turn a corner. If you even slightly tilt the joystick, you immediately over- or understeer and hit the side bumpers of the track. Another broken mechanic is the item pickups that give you weapons or defenses to use against other racers. They sometimes don’t register other racers and go past them, even though the attacks are supposed to lock-on. Using a protective item will often result in you still getting hit by attacks. It’s not like you need these items to be able to win the races, as they offer no challenge, but it’s still frustrating as basically anything can happen with them.
Then there are the sound and visuals. Like I said earlier, this is a game made for kids, but man does this game look ugly. There’s barely any lighting effects and the textures are pathetically bland. If you were to compare screenshots from this with those of PS2-era Nickelodeon games, you would barely be able to tell the difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out this game was originally made for smartphones and tablets, but later shoddily ported to consoles in hopes of making more money. Even the sound design is bafflingly bad. How bad, you ask? Well, half of the effects that happen on screen simply produce no sound. Hit the breaks? No sound effect. Transform in a plane or boat? No sound effect. Pick up an item? No sound effect. This game sounds like a half-finished beta, it’s that bad. In short, this game looks and sounds terrible.
Conclusion
It’s been a while since I’ve played a game that was as bad as Nickelodeon Kart Racers. There’s no effort put in it, making it difficult to get any enjoyment out of it. I can’t recommend this to anyone, not even young kids that watch Nickelodeon. There are far better racing games for them on the market and even if there weren’t, I’d still wouldn’t let them play this. The only positive thing I can say about it is that it works.
