Pac-Man Kart Rally Review

by Camjo-Z on Aug 19th, 2013

In the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twelve, Namco Bandai Romania decided they were tired of doing nothing and gathered up all eight of their employees to create their magnum opus. And thus, a mobile phone kart racer by the name of Pac-Man Kart Rally 3D was born. It was promptly deemed so shitty by the public that its creators were forced to return to their cave of shame and recreate it for Android and Window Phone… but when they emerged they had a game so truly astounding that they priced the game at the low cost of FREE so that even the populace with not a dollar to their name would too be able to partake in the joy of playing as a fat yellow ball in a car.

Upon starting up the game you are greeted by Pac-Man’s glorious visage, as he chomps his way across the screen- until A WILD ADVERTISEMENT APPEARS! It turns out Namco isn’t that generous, and you are actually only getting the trial version! Well, the full game is only $0.99. What could possibly go wrong?

As is the case with all truly great kart racers, the real draw of the game is the roster. With amazing characters pulled from all of Namco history, this is quite possibly the greatest assembly of heroes and villains the world has ever seen. Behold:

 

 You thought the new Pac-Man looked bad? Get a load of this abomination.

PAC-MAN, known for having one good game and then just kind of being there without doing anything important for 3 decades, returns to battle against the other Namco nobodies. Due to his gargantuan size and immense weight from years of eating dots he barely fits in his kart and is slow as molasses, but he still tries his hardest to beat the other challengers.

BLINKY, the Shadow, the Urchin, the Master. He has no goal in life other than to dominate, and he arrives to the races to reach first place, no matter who he has to kill to get there. The only thing that can stop his rampage is a Power Pellet, and even then it can only contain him for a few short seconds. He is the ultimate.

PINKY, the Speedy one, the Romper, is the only chick in the Ghost Gang. Because of this, she was never able to play with dolls or put on makeup, and instead was always forced to do manly things like work out and fix cars. Through accomplishing these tasks she was both able to grow hands and build her own kart, which she now uses to prove to the other ghosts that Girl Power is the mightiest force in the universe.

INKY, the Bashful one, the Stylist, does things his own way. Why? Because he is edgy like that. So edgy, in fact, that he doesn’t need to race to win. He’s fine getting second or third. Even fourth is fine. After all, it’s just a mobile phone kart racer. Who cares? Not Inky, that’s for sure. Fuck you.

CLYDE, the Pokey one, the Crybaby, is shit. Clyde was always shit and he will always be shit. Nobody likes Clyde.

THE PRINCE, future ruler of all the cosmos, rolls his way onto the scene. Tired of the constant barrage of insults he recieves from his Father, he has run away from home to join the races and prove that he is not entirely worthless. However, it turns out that when you are 5 inches tall, it’s pretty hard to not be worthless! The odds are stacked against him, but the Prince is prepared to do what it takes.

ICHIGO, the Prince’s cousin, likes strawberries. This is her only character trait. I guess this is what happens when you’re too lazy to make another character model so you have to reskin the Prince as one of his boring relatives.

TAIZO HORI, a.k.a. DIG DUG, tunnels his way to the rally. Most famous for being the only video game character in history to get married to a character from another game and then divorce them, Taizo originally thought that Pac-Man Kart Rally looked like the cheapest game he’d ever seen and refused to be associated with it… until he saw that his asshole son Susumu was taking part. Fueled by rage and Gatorade™, he joins the race to beat Mr. Driller at all costs.

SUSUMU HORI, a.k.a. MR. DRILLER, is Taizo’s son and a smug bastard. In 1999, Taizo was hard at work creating Dig Dug 3, until Susumu tricked the Namco executives at the last moment into making him the main character of the game and kicking Taizo out. Since then he has done nothing of worth but is still a massive douchebag, and races only to piss off his father.

THE FIGHTER, a.k.a. THE SHIP FROM GALAGA, not content with simply having its game rereleased on every system ever, decided to race for reasons unknown. What is known is that the Fighter is apparently a very sporting spaceship, as despite being able to fly it generously still adheres to the rules of land-based vehicles and is affected by both items on the ground and off-road terrain. The Fighter could very well be considered the Mother Teresa of aircraft.

With such an illustrious cast, one can only imagine that the gameplay would be just as finely crafted. And one could not be more incorrect! Pac-Man Kart Rally is quite possibly the worst kart racer I have ever had the misfortune of spending money on. There are many modes to choose from, but the only one that actually unlocks anything is Tournament mode so I’ll only discuss that! This mode has you compete in one of four cups (Pac-Man Cup, Ghost Cup, Katamari Cup, and Dig Dug Cup) against 3 other computer players in a race to see how fast you can press the power switch on your phone before you want to kill yourself. The drifting controls and handling are horrible, the bog standard Mario Kart-clone items are unbalanced and cheap, and the game holds the dubious honor of being the first and only 3D kart racer to have CAMERA issues. Half the time you will start drifting only to have no clue what direction to go next because the camera refuses to turn with you. Considering literally all that needed to be done to fix this was have it stay behind the driver like every other racing game ever, it astounds me that this problem even exists.

 

Losing the race before it even starts? Yep, you’re playing as Pac-Man!

Graphics-wise, the game fails to impress, or even reach a passable level. Character models are less impressive than those of N64 games, and the same 4 backgrounds and track assets are reused through 15 courses without even a palette swap to differentiate them. And on the sound front, the game doesn’t fare much better. There are exactly 4 songs in the game, one of which is used for both the menus and 6 of the courses, and all are fairly poor remixes of otherwise good Namco themes from Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, and Katamari Damacy. Every character is voiceless and the only other sounds you’ll hear during gameplay are repetitive boost noises and the occasional item.

Because there are no leaderboards, the only reason to play the game is to unlock new characters and karts, the former of which will take you roughly 20 minutes and the latter an entire day. You see, each character has three karts, two of which are locked. To unlock them, you have to beat all 4 cups with that character’s previous kart. So to unlock all of the karts you have to play at least 360 races total. This is such a massive timesink with such little payoff that I can’t fathom even the developers bothering to obtain all of them, and is just another example of the game’s poor design.

Oh, and there’s also local multiplayer over Wi-Fi, but have fun trying to get anyone to play this garbage with you!

In the end, despite all of the racers trying their hardest to win, everybody loses. But through the low-poly models, past the repetitive music, lies a moral to this cautionary tale: don’t have your fucking eight-man Romanian team make a game because you’re too cheap to pay a real developer owah!

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