Toonkars Racer

Genre: Isometric Racing

Players: 1

.

Review:

Toonkars Racer is an Isometric Racing game released in 2022 on Nintendo Switch, where players can customize their own vehicle and race it against others. And because I try to keep my opening paragraphs positive, that’s about the gist of what i can say here.

Okay, it’s not quite that bad… though it’s close. To its credit, the core mechanics of racing in Toonkars Racer is decent, if a bit overly-simplistic. The vehicles are reasonably responsive, while still drifting enough during tight turns to keep things interesting. No, the problem here is everything else.

Where to even begin? Well, first, there’s nothing to distinguish driving on roads from driving off-road – it doesn’t affect your speed or your traction. The only reason you would even stick to the roads is because this game uses a checkpoint system and if you don’t stay on the road you may miss one of those checkpoints. Also, some areas off-road are poorly-made and you may get stuck on scenery, with no hope of escape since the game doesn’t have a reset button other than to restart the entire race.

Second, this game is absurdly content-poor, with only four courses, no multiplayer, no difficulty settings, nothing. You’ll easily see everything there is to see within a half hour, and even then that’s only because the courses can get absurdly long and windy, making them take a long time to finish.

However, this brings me to the third issue, challenge, or complete lack thereof. The opposing cars you’re racing against are all significantly slower than you, and unless you’re a total dunce when it comes to Racing games, you’ll quickly overtake them and then spend the rest of the race putting increasingly more and more space between you and them, until you stop seeing them entirely for the latter part of the race.

The presentation doesn’t help things either – this game uses simple, amateurish-looking 3D with sparsely-decorated environments. This is backed by strangely over-dramatic cinematic music that doesn’t feel like it fits this game at all (and bizarrely, winning a race plays the Final Fantasy series’ fanfare theme). This is joined by car noises that, while good, seem to have odd mixing problems that make them fluctuate in volume for seemingly no reason.

In other words, Toonkars Racer is an absolute mess. While its core gameplay has potential, everything else is a disaster, with computer-controlled opponents that pose no challenge, no multiplayer, an ugly presentation, and numerous other problems. This feels like an incomplete game, and you shouldn’t bother wasting your time with it.

tl;dr – Toonkars Racer is an Isometric Racing game that is an absolute mess from top to bottom, with computer-controlled opponents that pose no challenge, a lack of multiplayer, an ugly presentation, and tons of other issues. 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, Johannes, Jaka, Jared Wark, Gabriel Coronad-Medina, Francis Obst, Kristoffer Wulff, Seth Christenfeld, and Vince Verrinoldi. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}