Dreamworks All-Star Kart Racing Review

My love for Shrek is unwavering and all content that includes my favourite ogre friend gets me excited to see his miserable face again. Cue the announcement of a karting game that included the king of creepy memes and as such I was excited to get my hands on it. 

Dreamworks All-Star Kart Racing includes all your favourites from the huge library of Dreamworks movie titles including characters from How to Train Your Dragon, Boss Baby and Trolls. The roster of characters is quite impressive and each character has a track associated with their movie, giving a rounded experience of being able to play in the world of your choice of character. 

The voice acting of the game is going to be one of the biggest gripes people have with the game. The off-brand acting feels like you’re listening to a bad impressionist and kind of ruins the illusion of playing with these characters. What I will say though, is that they’re largely the same voice actors that have been playing the video game counterparts of these characters for many many years, which at least feels consistent for the gaming experience. 

Dreamworks All-Star Kart Racing is a solid kart racer that has a lot going for it. The tracks are quite fun, if very short and the characters all have their own personality matching the movies they’re from. There are some interactions between characters which are fun to listen to but quickly voice lines become monotonous and a little distracting. Thankfully these voicelines can be removed while you’re racing. 

The issue is it just doesn’t feel as good as your classic racers like mario and crash. Part of this comes down to the lack of counterplay. When you’re being attacked by another racer, there is no warning before the contact so you spin out and can’t affect it in any way. This is quite frustrating when you come from other kart racers where you have warnings you’re about to be hit so you can dodge or fire something back.

The other problem is the game doesn’t feel very fun unless you’re playing on a higher difficulty. On Mario kart, 250cc feels like a challenge and is exciting and tough. On Dreamworks, their equivalent “lightning” difficulty feels like where the game should start, as it's speedy and provides a decent competitive edge. The lower speeds are just too slow and don’t sell a sense of inertia at all.

What this kart racer has is a couple of unique mechanics that aren’t present in other games in the genre. The mystery lyre is a mechanic that sees you fill up a bar that gives you a unique ability that changes depending on multiple factors. This can be a speed boost or a burst of notes, it changes all the time. There’s also a troll system where depending on the troll host of the race, the course can have different obstacles or boosts; the 6 different hosts provide unique changes. 

What’s here is a solid kart racing game that is worth a go if you’re bored of the other racers out there or are a big fan of Dreamworks movies. There isn’t anything revolutionary and it isn’t quite as chaotic and fun as the other big kart games but it’s better than all of the indie attempts at Kart racers, leaving it in a tough position.

6/10

A copy of the game was kindly provided for review.

Platinum Review:

Getting the platinum for Dreamworks All-Star Karting isn’t difficult but it is long. Very long. Even if you were to concentrate hard on unlocking the shop via completing mini objectives you would be nowhere near having enough notes to buy everything so just enjoy your experience playing as you would because I’ve got a top tip on how to achieve the platinum as fast as possible.

When you fail a challenge, you keep the notes you’ve earned. So head to Tier 3, challenge 3 and collect your 15 notes and hit the wall. That’s 15 banked roughly every 20 seconds of racing. Much quicker than 15 notes every 2 minute race.

The difficulty is a 2/10 and it will take roughly 30 hours to platinum.