I originally had this installed as I had planned to mess around with some party games with friends, but we didn't quite have enough time to get to this one, so I decided to pop this in on my PC Game Pass last night as a bit of a joke. Now I've played through my share of garbagio this year, mainly due to some extremely bad ideas here and there, and even though I admit a lot of the material I've been playing recently has been quite middling, I thought I was prepared for this.
I was not prepared for this.
The optimization confounded me, and I had to check my settings to make sure that NVIDIA Hairworks or some other secret setting was activated to cause this amount of slowdown. But no, the game's performance is just that horrendous. For some reason, it runs at under 20 FPS on the main menu. The main menu. And this performance translates to the actual racing game itself, where I couldn't get over 30 FPS on "High" settings (turned down slightly from Epic, with pretty much no noticeable changes in framerate) and consistently dipped below 15 FPS. Keep in mind that I'm running this on my PC with a 3070. But for some reason, it switches back to an unrestrained normal frame rate above 60 FPS during the in-game racing pause and the victory screen with all the placement times and points, like it’s wagging in your face what you could have, but don’t all because of its planned incompetence. There's also a ton of motion blur already turned on, and even turning it off, I felt constantly nauseated playing this because the screen is so zoomed in on the back of your kart (and to my knowledge, there is no FOV slider), so combined with the consistently low framerate, this game runs and feels like a bear wading through molasses.
The game itself is just rather bland and unfulfilling. Because of the super zoomed in perspective as mentioned above, it's pretty hard to figure out what's in front of you in time, so I was constantly colliding with walls when turning. Also, going up hills is a nightmare, as all you can see is the slope in front of you. Drifting does exist, but drifting at 17 FPS and then colliding into walls to lose all momentum was not worth the price. Not that my own struggles really mattered though, because the AI are laughably hapless and don't seem to know how to avoid obstacles/attacks, and there's no rubberbanding from what I can tell, so I was constantly super ahead of the entire pack. There are powerups, but they don't seem very useful in general because hitstun as far as I could tell was minimal (even after getting hit by AI attacks, I found myself still able to stay ahead of the pack or losing little speed in relation to them... or maybe this was also because they suck, could be both), and they completely disappear after a few seconds even without firing them when they're still surrounding your kart, so there's far less importance in held items and sandbagging items is pretty useless. Personally, I was far more interested in the obviously poorly edited popups of IRL Ryan with a thick white border, accompanied with his stock soundboard yells of "COOL" or "WAAAAOOOOWWW" or his constant reminders for me to use magic items with LT.
Somehow I feel like I wasted my money even though I only spent a dollar this month getting another first month of Game Pass, so there's that I guess. And even after playing obvious clone games this year like Pac-Man Party or Digimon Racing, this 30 min experience stands out in my mind because somehow this feels like more a shitpost than Sonic Shuffle. Maybe my friends were onto something this year insisting that they didn't have enough time to stop on by for Party Game Weekend 2.0 this time around... either way, it just means I'll have to step up my game and have a better list prepped for next time.
I was not prepared for this.
The optimization confounded me, and I had to check my settings to make sure that NVIDIA Hairworks or some other secret setting was activated to cause this amount of slowdown. But no, the game's performance is just that horrendous. For some reason, it runs at under 20 FPS on the main menu. The main menu. And this performance translates to the actual racing game itself, where I couldn't get over 30 FPS on "High" settings (turned down slightly from Epic, with pretty much no noticeable changes in framerate) and consistently dipped below 15 FPS. Keep in mind that I'm running this on my PC with a 3070. But for some reason, it switches back to an unrestrained normal frame rate above 60 FPS during the in-game racing pause and the victory screen with all the placement times and points, like it’s wagging in your face what you could have, but don’t all because of its planned incompetence. There's also a ton of motion blur already turned on, and even turning it off, I felt constantly nauseated playing this because the screen is so zoomed in on the back of your kart (and to my knowledge, there is no FOV slider), so combined with the consistently low framerate, this game runs and feels like a bear wading through molasses.
The game itself is just rather bland and unfulfilling. Because of the super zoomed in perspective as mentioned above, it's pretty hard to figure out what's in front of you in time, so I was constantly colliding with walls when turning. Also, going up hills is a nightmare, as all you can see is the slope in front of you. Drifting does exist, but drifting at 17 FPS and then colliding into walls to lose all momentum was not worth the price. Not that my own struggles really mattered though, because the AI are laughably hapless and don't seem to know how to avoid obstacles/attacks, and there's no rubberbanding from what I can tell, so I was constantly super ahead of the entire pack. There are powerups, but they don't seem very useful in general because hitstun as far as I could tell was minimal (even after getting hit by AI attacks, I found myself still able to stay ahead of the pack or losing little speed in relation to them... or maybe this was also because they suck, could be both), and they completely disappear after a few seconds even without firing them when they're still surrounding your kart, so there's far less importance in held items and sandbagging items is pretty useless. Personally, I was far more interested in the obviously poorly edited popups of IRL Ryan with a thick white border, accompanied with his stock soundboard yells of "COOL" or "WAAAAOOOOWWW" or his constant reminders for me to use magic items with LT.
Somehow I feel like I wasted my money even though I only spent a dollar this month getting another first month of Game Pass, so there's that I guess. And even after playing obvious clone games this year like Pac-Man Party or Digimon Racing, this 30 min experience stands out in my mind because somehow this feels like more a shitpost than Sonic Shuffle. Maybe my friends were onto something this year insisting that they didn't have enough time to stop on by for Party Game Weekend 2.0 this time around... either way, it just means I'll have to step up my game and have a better list prepped for next time.
3 Comments
definitely worse than m&m kart racing
I found M&M Kart Racing at a goodwill seven years ago. I almost bought it but when I was at the counter I said no. Greatest decision of my entire life
HylianBran
1 year ago