Aquapark io

Genre: Racing Game

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

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Review:

Aquapark io, released on mobile devices in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a Racing Game where players will nominally dodge opponents and other obstacles on a long, twisty water slide to try to be the first one to get to the pool at the bottom. However, I say “nominally” because most players likely won’t be spending much time on the slides themselves.

Racing on the slides is tedious and frustrating. Players have no control over their speed, and their control over their movement left and right is so sluggish that it’s often impossible to dodge obstacles. However, this hardly matters, because players will quickly discover that it’s far easier to just jump over the side and try to skip entire sections of the slide. Or even better – drop directly into the pool. In real life, doing so would be suicidal, but in the game, this is the only fun the game has to offer.

Not to sell the game short, the first few times you do this, it’s delightful. For me, it brought back memories of using this trick in the giant penguin race in Super Mario 64, as well as in Mario Kart 64 on the Rainbow Road track. However, when you’re doing this in every single race, it stops feeling like a fun trick and more like you’re just playing a different sort of game. And that different sort of game isn’t all that much better than the slide-racing game, unfortunately.

Your lack of control over your racer extends to their movement in the air, with players constantly moving forward and only able to slowly turn left or right. It’s enough to give players some ability to aim their movement, but not enough to feel fully in control. What’s worse, any feeling you may have had that you were cleverly skipping ahead of the competition is absolutely ruined by this game’s staggeringly ridiculous rubber-banding, which is so atrocious I hesitate to even call it that – it’s like the other opponents teleport immediately behind you wherever you are on the track, and then are immediately given a speed boost to shoot ahead of you. It’s not like these opponents are taking the same shortcuts you are, either – you never see them in the air.

The presentation here isn’t all that great either. This game uses pretty simple 3D for its visuals, with some ugly, low-poly character designs for its racers. And some tracks are so poorly-designed that the scenery clips right through the slide itself, and since the only things in this game with any hit detection are the slide, track obstacles, racers, ground, and pool, players who think they have to dodge these bits of scenery will soon find that they just pass right through them instead. And all of this is backed by some extremely repetitive instrumental surf rock, with the “you just lost” horn clip from The Price is Right playing when you faceplant on solid ground, which seems like it must be breaking some sort of copyright law…

In the end, Aquapark io is an extremely poorly-designed racing game that simply isn’t fun, and then when you find you can get a different sort of fun by playing the game differently, the game steps in and ruins that too. It’s ugly, in many ways broken, and is ultimately just not worth your time or money.

tl;dr – Aquapark io is a Racing Game where in theory players race on a long, twisty water slide to get to the pool at the bottom, but in reality most will end up jumping off the sides to take the more direct route and fall there instead. However, no matter which way you play the game, it’s frustrating, controls poorly, features ugly and at times broken graphics, and has rubber-banding so bad I’m not even sure it qualifies as rubber-banding anymore instead of just straight-up cheating. There are a few real moments of joy to be found here, but for the most part this is a ride that should be condemned for its severe safety violations… and I’m not talking about how you can jump off of the slides.

Grade: D+

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