[Review] Garfield Kart - Furious Racing

[Bandolero -]

Games about Garfield went unrecognized for years, and the world was a better place. Europe got a series of dreadful 3D platformers, the Wii saw some miserable party games, and there was probably some DS shovelware, too. But in 2013, millennial irony began to pick up in po[CENSORED]rity, and so it was that Garfield Kart became the subject of widespread sarcastic, ironic admiration. One glance at the 2013 title's Steam page reveals a "Very Positive" consensus out of over 4,000 reviews.

Now, five years later, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing arrives at a time when Jon Arbuckle drinking canine ejaculate is a bonafide classic meme and Garfield has been reborn into a postmodern icon. In a way, it doesn't matter what the establishment says about this game - the people have accepted it as art, and so art it is. But I, a simple critic, have a job to do. And that job entails saying that despite surefire improvements over the last entry, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is nothing more than a basically serviceable kart racer with clear budgetary restraints, lack of content, and some glaring flaws.

Everybody's Super Garfield Racing

Furious Racing joins a long, pedigreed line of mascot kart racers. It stands side by side with classics like South Park Rally, Homie Rollerz, and M&M's Kart Racing. Joking aside, players basically know what to expect here. Cartoon characters get in silly cars and race each other on whimsical tracks, chucking items at each other in a blistering race to the finish. It's the same formula Nintendo shook up in the early 90s, and there's not too much different here.

Furious Racing definitely takes more than a few cues from Nintendo's latest kart racer, speaking of which. The focus on constant boosting, drifting, and stunting is hewed very closely from Mario Kart 8, but without that game's lively physics or, y'know, any sort of mechanical soundness. That isn't to say that it's broken, per se, but everything feels just a little off-kilter - like thinking too hard about what Jon did to Lyman.

Lacking The Spice Of Life

The thing is, that Faygo-tinged kart racer is just about all you'll be getting with this game. You race around sixteen tracks, pick up the optional collectibles, and that's about it. Rinse and repeat. There are different ways to mess around with cars in the garage. There's an online component that works well enough. Oh, and for the DOTA 2 fans out there, you can collect hats for each character! That's... fun?

That's one of the main problems with Furious Racing. What's here is fine, but it's not enough. There's no story mode, no bonus modes, no incentive to snag all the collectibles other than the bragging rights of having weird collectible photos of the cast and all the hats. Why would you invest much time in this thing outside of playing all the tracks, then go about your way? I'm not sure, because if someone's in the market for a go-to kart racer, most people aren't going to keep coming back to this one. Even if they're looking outside of Mario, stuff like Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed exists.

But while the rest of Furious Racing could be described, at worst, as unremarkable and flaccid, one part of the game drags the whole package down: the sound design. The bloody, dreadful cacophony of hell noises that is the soundtrack and sound effects.

Everything about the audio track of this game almost gave me a headache, and frankly, it was unplayable with a headset. There's so much discordant audio, so many clashing and loud noises, such grating music that it made me physically recoil every time a race got hot and heavy. The audio design isn't just poor - it's an active affront to the senses and a slight against the very concept of sound itself.

Sputtering Out

But even replacing the audio and repressing the traumatic memory of ever having heard it can't trick me into thinking Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is anything other than a thoroughly mediocre kart racer. There's not a lot here, and what's here is technically acceptable but unremarkable. Yeah, it's fifteen dollars, and yeah, it's for kids. But fifteen dollars can get you a lot more, and kids are smarter than we give them credit for.

So the people may claim Garfield Kart: Furious Racing as art. They'll prop it up as a postmodern masterpiece and turn this time-warped mid-aught's licensed racer into some kind of strange meme. But just like Freddy Got Fingered isn't secretly a brilliant work of anti-humor, this game isn't anything other than a cheap, budget racer that's content to rip off its bigger, better competition while not offering any substantial improvements on them.