Buggy Off-Road Racing

Genre: Arcade Racing

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in 6 in 1 Racing Games Collection, along with Adrenaline Rush: Miami Drive, Formula Racing Pro 2025, Go Kart Mania, Motorbikes Pro 2025, and Real Drift Racing.)

Buggy Off-Road Racing is a family-friendly Arcade-style Racing Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024. As the title suggests, this game has you racing a dirt buggy on off-road racing courses.

For a $5 game that only takes up 317MB of memory, Buddy Off-Road Racing looks surprisingly decent, with colorful, slightly-cartoony 3D courses and vehicles. There’s very little here in the way of impressive visuals, there’s noticeable pop-in in the distance, there’s an overuse of colored screen filters to imply time of day or differing location, and some artistic choices here are questionable (Australia apparently has lime green skies and neon green water) but there’s decent detail in environments and everything maintains a nice framerate and resolution, so I can’t complain too much. Well, except when it comes to the repetitive, annoying rock-style background music that’s the same for every race.

The core gameplay here is decent enough too, with movement feeling good and the courses being reasonably varied. The problem here is that this game does absolutely nothing to build on that foundation.

The game features only three courses, which the game stretches thin by having you play them normal, reversed, flipped, and then both flipped and reversed. There’s also little nuance or depth to the gameplay, just gas, brake, and a limited number of turbo boosts per race. You can use race winnings to improve your vehicle’s stats and get more turbo boosts, but already at the start this game is fairly easy.

Given the lack of depth and limited number of courses, as well as no multiplayer, you can see pretty much everything Buggy Off-Road Racing has to offer within 15 minutes. At that point, it doesn’t matter that the gameplay is sound, the graphics are decent, and the price is low, there’s just not enough here to be worth bothering with. I recommend you skip this and find a Racing game with more meat on its bones.

tl;dr – Buggy Off-Road Racing is a family-friendly Arcade-style Racing game that plays well enough and looks decent enough, but is so shallow and lacking in content that you can see everything it has to offer in 15 minutes. Even at its low $5 price, it’s just not worth the bother.

Grade: C-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Most Efficient Use of File Storage Space

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