You might expect the worst when you start up DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing. After all, the game kicks off with a tutorial featuring Shrek and Donkey, except Shrek is voiced by the worst Mike Myers impersonator imaginable. The Eddie Murphy imitator is a little more tolerable, but still: it doesn’t seem to bode well for the future.
Once you get beyond the tutorial, however, things improve substantially. There’s a solid amount of content here, including 20 racers drawn from well-known Dreamworks properties like Trolls, Madagascar, and the aforementioned Shrek, along with 20 tracks based on some of the studio’s best-known films. You also have all the usual game modes that you would expect in a kart racer, like cups and time trials and different levels of difficulty, which means that you won’t be lacking for things to do if you want to pick this game up.
More importantly, racing is pretty decent. The cars handle well, and the game does a good job of differentiating between the different weight classes and abilities of the racers, as well as giving you plenty of options for customizing the cars. Likewise, the tracks are nicely varied, each of them having their own unique personalities and secrets to discover. They also look surprisingly pretty, and you can tell that a fair amount of care has gone into their development and visual design.
The only place where DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing lags is in its weapons and other goodies. None of the pickups seem all that effective; in fact, they all seem kind of interchangeably useless. There are a healthy amount of speed boosts scattered all over the place, but there’s still nothing here that’s remotely as good or useful as a red shell – or even a green shell, for that matter.
Nonetheless, DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing is still a decent racer overall. Much like the studio that inspired it, it’s not going to make you forget the genre’s king, but there’s fun to be found here if you give it a chance.
GameMill Entertainment provided us with a DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing PS5 code for review purposes.
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