[Review]Garfield Kart - Furious Racing

[[MC]Ronin[MC]]

 

Garfield, the famous lasagna-loving cat is back to take on Jon, Odie and company in a no-holds-barred racing game!

Choose your character and kart according to their characteristics and your driving style, get off the starting line first and control skids to outrun your opponents. Use crazy bonus objects, like the Pillow or the Magic Wand, to gain an edge and get over the finishing line first. Are you lazy like Garfield? Take shortcuts to overtake the other racers with the Spring!
Race your friends in local mode or online, with up to eight players on 16 iconic circuits from the world of Garfield.

3 GAME MODES: Grand Prix, Single Race, Time Trial

MULTIPLAYER up to 4 players in split-screen mode and up to 8 players in online mode

16 CIRCUITS: Crazy races in stunning environments inspired by the world of Garfield, such as Palerock Lake and Pastacosi Factory

8 CHARACTERS: Garfield, Odie, Jon, Nermal, Arlene, Liz, Harry and Squeak

9 ATTACK AND DEFENSE BONUSES to turn the race around

CUSTOMIZE your character and kart with dozens of accessories

 

 

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.

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.

For example, you can do tricks, but the inputs for them are a bit unclear. You can drift, but karts lean into it just a little too much. You can throw projectiles, but they never aim quite the way you want, and some of them are just buck wild with what they can do (such as a magic wand that swaps your place with another racer). There's something unmistakably inspired by its bigger, better competition in here, yet it feels less like a carbon copy and more adjacent to a sketchy 3 AM gas station Xerox.

Like a Faygo alternative to a po[CENSORED]r soda, Furious Racing offers a take on the genre that isn't necessarily bad, and a serviceable alternative to the main product, but is absolutely a knock-off and definitively never going to be the mainstream choice.

 

 

 

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.

It's with this lack of variety and length that Furious Racing starts to fall apart. There are better, and at this point, cheaper alternatives that offer the same thing with more to do.

 

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.

Ultimately, I muted the thing, cranked up some Luxury Elite, and powered through the rest of this. Weirdly enough? It definitely improved the game.

 

 

 

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.

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: AMD Athlon 7850 Dual Core Processor 2.8GHz
Memory: 2 GB memory
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512MB
DirectX: Version 11
Storage space: 5 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: AMD FX-6100 Six-Core Processor 3.3 GHz
Memory: 4 GB memory
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 2 GB DDR3
DirectX: Version 12
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage space: 6 GB available space