Tiny Derby

Genre: Arcade / Racing (Misc.) / Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Tiny Derby is a mobile-style Arcade game with Racing and Puzzle elements released on mobile devices in 2017 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game has players trying to help their yellow anthropomorphic square win a foot race against other squares by placing power-up and power-down items on the track to help your competitor and hinder others.

The presentation here is extremely simple, using colorful, basic geometric shapes for the competitors and backgrounds, all packaged within menus that absolutely scream “mobile game”. This is joined by cartoony sound effects and the William Tell Overture while racing. It all works, but it seems extremely basic.

The gameplay, at least, does seem to have an interesting premise, having players help along their character rather than controlling them directly. Unfortunately, multiple problems really wreck the execution here. First, there’s very little in the way of variety here. What’s worse, the characters often stack up on each other, particularly in a close race, making it especially hard to use an item on a specific character. And making things even worse, the game forces the cursor to “snap to” characters, making it absurdly difficult to place it where you want at times.

The result is a game that is far too simple to live up to the good idea of its premise, and that then proceeds to fail miserably at executing even on that overly-simple gameplay. Tiny Derby has all the charm of a shovelware mobile game, with none of the compelling gameplay. Don’t bother with this one.

tl;dr – Tiny Derby is a mobile-style Arcade game with Racing and Puzzle elements that has players trying to help their yellow square win a foot race against other squares by placing power-up and power-down items on the track. It’s an interesting idea made mediocre by a lack of depth and variety, then made outright bad due to terrible game design and controls. Don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}