#Garfield kart ign license#

It really begs the question: Why go to the effort of making a game with the Garfield license, in a certain genre, if you’re not going to use said license or genre in any kind of interesting way? Was there a Garfield Kart-sized hole in 2019’s release slate? I’d argue no.Garfield Kart is an arcade battle race. In a genre where all you need to do to be even average is to copy what everyone else is doing, Furious Racing somehow still fails at doing that. I can still hear the petulant whine, screaming their demonic hellsong into the center mix of my soundbar until I wished, wished that the migraine their sounds induced would escalate into a full-on aneurysm. Don’t get me started on the Kart engine sounds, either. The item selection gets by on being a total facsimile of other, better racers, trading shells and banana peels for things like lasagne and pies. The tracks don’t help they’re all flat, uninspired circuits with no memorable or exciting turns or any semblance of verticality or variety in their layouts. The driving model is competent enough, but lacks any real sense of speed or skill. Again, all the pieces are here, they just don’t make for a compelling whole. The most critical thing in all of this though, and the biggest crime that Garfield Kart commits, is that the racing just isn’t exciting.

#Garfield kart ign Offline#

Sure, everything is accounted for – single player races, grand prix and time trial, as well as both offline and online multiplayer – but it’s less “Come check out this exciting mode!” and more “This is what the design brief said we had to include.” And, as you can imagine, the online servers are about as devoid of people as my ninth birthday party. A barebones and unexciting suite of modes further exemplifies this. Soon after booting up the game and bearing witness to the high-school-PowerPoint menus and nightmarish character models, it’s clear that this game was made with about as much care as Garfield himself would apply to anything that isn’t lasagna. But there has to be somebody out there with a very specific pining for a very specific breed of half-baked, franchise-milking PS2-era kart racer played through the filter of modern technology, and I just want them to know they might be interested in this.įor everyone but that one guy though, Furious Racing has almost nothing to offer that isn’t better somewhere else. Is that a reason to fork out $40 for a violently average game? Not at all. Garfield Kart – Furious Racing feels a lot like the old cartoon tie-in games of the early 3D console generations, and I kinda dig that about it. Now, I know that all sounds harsh, but in a strange twist that I’m not even sure is legal in the field of video game review writing – I actually have a counterpoint to my own criticism of the game. This is a kart racer that not only does nothing inventive to try and carve out a space for itself within the market, but it barely manages to get the fundamentals right. Garfield Kart, on the other hand, does not. What makes a good kart racer? Is it exciting track design that’s fun to master? Accessible yet tight driving controls? Is it a varied and interesting selection of power-ups? There’s a reason that the genre has long been dominated by the likes of Mario Kart (although we were blessed this year with the excellent Team Sonic Racing ), it has all of that and more. Whether it needed to happen or not though, it has, so the real question becomes – is this latest entry into what can now technically be called a franchise any good? The short answer is no.Īctually, that’s the long answer as well, but let me preface that with another question. And yes, Garfield Kart – Furious Racing is not the first time the lasagna-loving tabby and his friends have found themselves behind the wheel. Of all the things that people are nostalgic for in 2019 – I didn’t think Garfield Kart would be one of them.