SmuggleCraft

Genre: Futuristic Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

SmuggleCraft is set in a futuristic world with a totalitarian regime that… really doesn’t matter. The story in this game is largely throwaway. You’re a rebel, dealing with shady characters, yada yada yada.

The fact of it is, whether you’re racing or smuggling, this game is still, well, racing. Sometimes you’ll be hounded by this game’s version of the cops from Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, but that doesn’t usually amount to much.

The game’s scenery is designed in a way reminiscent of what 3D renderings looked like back when 3D graphics were still fairly new – everything is untextured and low-poly. It has a certain charm, although it’s clearly used to mask a low design budget, since the ships all still look ugly and the moment you leave the courses you fall off into an empty void.

This will happen more than you think, because the samey-ness of the courses sometimes makes it difficult to see where you should be going, and the course design doesn’t help matters, with open-ended areas that seem aimless and make it necessary to consult the little arrow pointing you to where to go.

To the game’s credit, the gameplay is fairly smooth and the framerates seem consistent, but there’s a samey-ness to the game’s courses, and it seems that they just re-use the same maps over and over again with different color schemes. Again, it feels like corners were cut here.

If there weren’t any competition, this would be serviceable, but even though Nintendo has seemingly abandoned the F-Zero franchise, Fast RMX is picking up the slack, and presenting a visual feast that puts this game to shame. In light of that, it’s kinda’ hard to recommend this game.

It also bears mention, this game takes up an insane 11.6GB on your memory card. For comparison, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe takes up 6.9GB. That a game this ugly can be this much of a resource hog is mind-boggling.

In the end, SmuggleCraft is sufficient racing game that at least gets the basics right, but it’s just not in the same league with Fast RMX, which really makes the genre soar in the wake of the absence of F-Zero. If you already have Fast RMX and are itching for more futuristic racing, this might make for a sufficient diversion, but not much more than that.

tl;dr – SmuggleCraft is a futuristic racing game that gets the core racing down, but not much else. And since the Switch has Fast RMX, there doesn’t seem much reason to get this game.

Grade: C-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards:

Winner:

The “Why is this taking so much space on my memory card!?” Award – When an indie racing game uses featureless, untextured, polygonal terrain, and looks cheap, you kinda’ don’t expect it to be one of the biggest resource hogs on the Nintendo Switch. Yet this game takes up a whopping 11.6GB of space on your memory card, putting it at nearly twice the amount of space taken up by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It is simply astounding that a game that takes up this much space can look this bad.

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