Beach Buggy Racing 2: Island Adventure

Genre: Kart Racing

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

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Review:

Beach Buggy Racing 2 is a family-friendly Kart Racing game released on mobile devices in 2018, ported to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2021. Where the first Beach Buggy Racing had the unfortunate bad timing of releasing in the same year as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, this sequel has the opportunity to stand out and not be stuck in the shadow of arguably the greatest Kart Racing game ever made. Does it manage that feat?

Well… no. In fact, while there has been some attempt at improving on the first Beach Buggy Racing game, pretty much all of the problems from the original game are still present here.

At $20, twice the price of the original Beach Buggy Racing, this sequel does not look particularly improved. To be fair, it still has some good things going for it in the graphics department. The game has a good overall resolution and a consistently silky-smooth framerate, even in 4-player split-screen mode. And it still touts colorful and varied visuals, and water and lighting effects that are occasionally quite nice. And all of this is only taking up 742MB of memory on the Nintendo Switch, which is quite impressive. But once again, both the maps you’re racing on and especially the racers themselves are fairly low-poly, looking almost like featureless Muppets more than identifiable characters.

There’s still this feeling of everything being generic here. Once again, the locations here look nice, but don’t have a strong personality to them, and the menus shout “mobile game”. This is not helped by the game’s sounds, which are still quite generic and reminiscent of mobile games, and with the various drivers all being unsettlingly mute. And where the first game at least played into the island theme with appropriate music, this time the generic-sounding music doesn’t seem to have any theme in mind beyond “this is a kid’s game!”

As for the gameplay, this game does manage to add a bit more nuance to the game – players can now use their characters’ abilities multiple times in each race, and each racer can store two pickup abilities. In addition, players can get a boost when starting each race by timing a button press. However, this hardly feels like a great victory for this series – Mario Kart was doing these sorts of things multiple generations ago. And making things worse, the controls this time around actually feel somewhat less responsive, which is frustrating.

There are a few additional complaints I have regarding the multiplayer. Firstly, players using only a single Joy-Con will once again find that they’ll be playing with the gas button always-on, with no way to turn this feature off. They can still use the Joy-Con’s SL button to brake, but even so, this is annoying. Also, at this point it’s just ridiculous that this game does not feature any sort of online functionality.

In four years, this series has barely progressed at all. In some ways, it has improved slightly, but in others it seems slightly worse. Despite this, Beach Buggy Racing 2 remains a decent-enough low-cost alternative to Mario Kart, but with the price tag now at $20, it’s harder to even give this game leeway for being a budget title, especially not when some really great Kart Racers like Crash Team Racing and Team Sonic Racing regularly go on sale for less than that. In the end, if you like Kart Racers, you’ll probably enjoy this game, but you have three better options on the Nintendo Switch, and if you’re looking for a low-cost alternative, you’re better off spending even less and just getting the first Beach Buggy Racing.

tl;dr – Beach Buggy Racing 2 is a family-friendly Kart Racing game that more or less has all the same good and bad qualities as the first game, at twice the price. And at $20, it’s harder to forgive the lack of depth or overall generic presentation, especially when this game is on a platform with so many better alternatives.

Grade: C

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