Wow only…
a month late, whoopsies?
Here come little-fish-chewing me trying to tackle this multi-year wait of a legally-distinct full karting product of a game, cheers.
(Note: Most of this is based on the campaign, version 1.09, with some extra bugs noticed through Free Play.
The latter part of this review might seem a bit downer-y or nitpicky, I just wanted to balance off the endless praise with something useful.)
First of all, victory lap for everybody involved, the bloody amount of effort this took – from getting the graphics so right and maintaining accessibility, to the actual programming aspect of it, and the logistics of ‘getting everything to work™’, and finally the game design: the always-fresh level design, the excellent sound design emphasizing each action to a T, and tuning the controls to be understandable and flexible – must have been excruciating, and getting it out at all requires extreme talent and experience.
Second, blood champagne for the VAs, great characterizing and emphatic work all around and everybody sounds appropriately diseased for the environment.
Third is a dozen good gold medals for the audio department (again), not only are the SFXs punctuated, but the music is surprisingly energetic and full of life, incredibly bloodpumping OST overall.
There’s only so many times I can sing praises, so let me hum something a bit more practical.
The AI of the first couple races (and battles but to a lesser extent) are quite weak, and don’t actively compete with you, once you’ve gotten past them, the only thing that can even slightly mess you up is the Galaxy powerup (with enough distance, this isn’t a problem).
Some of the karts as well as melee weapons feel somewhat redundant, I get the purpose of some are heavy tradeoffs but you can mostly do pretty well with your kart and possibly Nicholas’ birdcage.
Of the birdcage, the Mansion is truly my least favorite, not necessarily because it’s different, Nick just felt annoying, “like c’mon man let me kill you real fast please™”, it was easily the hardest to ace (with the exception of the final FFA, which (seems to have) counted the outro and credit scroll as playtime).
There are also a few design hiccups: it’s tricky to aim backwards on keyboard, there’s no kill feedback (who knows, that killfeed might’ve been coincidental), some UI is hard to see on dark BGs and skyboxes, the tutorial missed (I say this because the tutorial explains a lot) some concepts, mostly nitpicks.
Bug/Issues Report:
-Sometimes when the Insight is knocked out of your hands, you will still ‘have’ it, and can throw it, despite it being out and about, other people can pick up the insight.
-Miralodian courtyard is cheesy, just run around in an infinity pattern, taking the ramps, then taking the boost ramps, the AI will never catch you.
-Initial weapons do not get restored if you lose the insight, more of a ‘nice option’ thing.
-Voice gets set to 1 on NG+, don’t know if it happens the other way around, also may switch around?
-Respawned once with the insight in the forest, weird.
-Sometimes, possibly if you receive powerup reloads too quickly, you’ll be unable to use the powerup and the reload symbol and highlight will remain.
-Finally, that credits screen is very nice but if I’m not acquainted with everybody’s work, I don’t know who did what.
Sorry again that the review seems so negative at the end.
I wanna make this absolutely clear, YOU HUNTED.