Nickelodeon Kart Racers Reviews
Nickelodeon Kart Racers is a great addition to the family-friendly kart racing genre. Visually, it’s very colourful, the characters are all well represented and there is a lot going on but not too much that it becomes a distraction. While lacking an online mode, the fact that it has a local 2-4 player mode is amazing and can be played by families and friends as they see who can emerge the victor.
Even though Nickelodeon Kart Racers may appear to be another cartoon cash-in, it actually offers solid racing gameplay.
If you like Nickelodeon and you're a kid, you'll like it. It's not as good as Mario Kart 8, but it's still good fun.
But at best, it's a solid entry into a rather stagnant kart racing genre. It may be lacking a bit of personality and polish, but zooming around the track as Tommy Pickles or Patrick Star is a lot of fun. And, Mario Kart aside, it's probably the best karting game we've seen so far this generation.
If you're looking for a fun karting experience on the Nintendo Switch, are on a budget, and your kids love the cartoon series from Nickelodeon, then this $39.99 release is definitely going to make them very happy. My kids are certainly fans of Rugrats, SpongeBob SquarePants and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so they ended up gravitating to those characters when playing the game for many hours.
Nickelodeon Kart Racers is an unpolished Mario Kart clone, but with that being said it manages to capture the excitement of a Mario Kart race, so it's worth checking out if you don't own any existing Mario Kart titles.
That said, it's hard to recommend this game to a general audience, especially with the miles better Mario Kart 8 Deluxe available on Switch, and Team Sonic Racing on the horizon. Nickelodeon Kart Racers has no online function, and its unlockable Grand Prix cups are just different combinations of tracks from the base cups. There is a decent progression and cart customization system here, but bland visuals and uninspired gameplay mean you can probably sit this race out.
As a whole younger gamers may really get a kick out of Nickelodeon Kart Racers but I’d say their enjoyment would heavily depend on both their familiarity with Mario Kart and their outright love for these characters. The further they are on the scale towards the latter rather than the former the better hopes that the game will have some longevity. For all of the modes and small touches that it brings to the table, though, it’s impossible to escape the fact that overall it feels like a knock off and without its colorful and popular license it likely wouldn’t warrant much attention at all.
Overall, Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix is a complicated kart racing game that might please experienced kart racing fans but isn’t approachable for casual players who could pick it up to play as Squidward in a Mario Kart clone. The visuals aren’t too interesting and neither are the tracks themselves, but there is a true depth to kart selection and customization that makes the game more challenging than many other simple kart racers. It’s a worthy game for racing fans, but if you’re planning on a fun casual party game with friends, this might not be what you’re looking.
While Nickelodeon Kart Racers' provides plenty of content and has smart references that integrate well with some very solid racing, the poor visuals and botched battle mode leave plenty to be desired. If you accept the game for what it is there's definitely some fun to be had but its shortcomings are jarring enough to require some substantial blinders.
While there is some fun to be had, especially in local multiplayer, the overall experience is more underwhelming than not. That makes this game very difficult to recommend to all but the most rdent kart racing or Nickelodeon fans. Even within those camps, who are more apt to overlook flaws with NKR, the experience leaves a lot to be desired.
That's a small target audience, and for the many more outside of it, Nickelodeon: Kart Racers definitely isn't worth the ride.
Players looking for another kart racer and have experienced their fill of Mario Kart can find some fun here, but I would most certainly wait for a price drop. Even then, don't go looking here for a bountiful game. There a fun one-off experience and that's about it.
Nickelodeon: Kart Racers is a bit all over the place. While the maps that focus on boat racing suffer from bad controls and difficulty issues, this game offers enough variety to occasionally bring a reasonably good time
Overall, it’s a game that borrows heavily on nostalgia and caters to kids and their parents who’ve watched the show or just want to play with their kids. Considering there is no online mode, they have no choice but to invite friends over or play with the family. It’s a clone of a game that i’ll hide in the name of Kario Mart but falls short and failed to introduce new mechanics that could improve the genre. Motion controls is a bit of a hit or miss like auto-accelerate. It’s probably there for kids but not advisable for drifting as it’s clunky and at times hard to initiate.
Nickelodeon Kart Racers had so much potential, but in the end, it turned out to be yet another Shovelware failure. While the game has a lot more tracks than you’d expect, the overall package is a disappointment for both diehard Nickelodeon fans, and for casual players. If you or your kids are huge fans of the IP then it might be worth waiting for a price cut.
I couldn’t recommend this to anyone but the most hardcore of Nickelodeon fans and if your child asks you for it really consider it before you part with your money.
You would need to be a really hardcore SpongeBob SquarePants, Rugrats, Hey Arnold!, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan to prefer this. I don't doubt that there is a really good game that could be made with the Nickelodeon license, but it needs to have much better core mechanics. And with such a great library of Nickelodeon properties available, you can't help but feel it should be using more of them.
No online multiplayer, oddly narrow selection of properties, a lack of characters and imagery from the shows they used along with oddities like no voice work make it hard to recommend, there's the nugget of a great kart racer in here but it all feels so half-hearted. A real shame.
This is an bland, tasteless, and failed game with some of the gratest characters of Nickelodeon cartoons of the last decade on it. We expect this failure to not make anybody that Nickelodeon licenses have no future in games, because they are. Simply not this time.
Review in Spanish | Read full review