“Garfield, the famous lasagna-loving cat, is back!” That’s according to the description for Garfield Kart Furious Racing on the Nintendo eShop. The reality, however, is quite another matter entirely. Despite a description (and a price tag) that would suggest this is a sequel to the infamous Garfield Kart, we’ve got news for you: it’s not. Furious Racing is actually a remaster of the original Garfield Kart, in that the tracks have been given a bit of a lick of paint. Amazingly, though, it manages to actually be worse than the six-year-old game it’s based on.
Sorry, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We should know better, because Garfield Kart: Furious Racing teaches you not to do that. You could be looking at a turn ahead of you, thinking of how you’re going to approach it, when the game could ask: “Hold on a minute there, Snappy. You’re getting quite cocky there, sizing up that turn. Have you ever considered the possibility that I might just crash your kart for absolutely no reason? Well, consider it, child, because I might.” Let’s go back a step, then.
For those not familiar with it, the original Garfield Kart became somewhat infamous for its low quality, with things stepping up a gear when a prominent YouTuber declared it the worst game ever made. To be clear, it wasn’t: it was nowhere near it. At the risk of an “OK boomer” comeback, we’ve been in this game long enough to know there have been plenty of titles over the years that were far worse than Garfield Kart. That’s not so say it was any good, mind you – we tore it a new catflap when it was released on the 3DS – just that its notoriety came as a result of some sizeable exaggeration.
On paper, Furious Racing is the same game. You get the same eight racers from the Garfield universe, including the famous feline himself, his tragic owner Jon and other such well-loved characters as Odie, um... Squeak the mouse, and Harry. Look, you shut your ignorant mouth, of course you know who Harry is. It’s Harry! From Garfield! The thing with the cat! Yes, of course, now you know who I mean. Well, Harry’s in there along with the rest of the gang.
You also get the same 16 tracks that were in the first game. None of these were particularly awe-inspiring in the first place, and slightly improving the environment detail doesn’t exactly transform them into Mario Kart contenders. It doesn’t even transform them into Race with Ryan contenders. Consider this: of the 16 tracks available, four of them are desert tracks. That’s a quarter of the entire game, a game based on a cat who famously rarely leaves his house, let alone travels to the chuffing desert.
There are also eight cars that correspond with each character, though you can swap them around to have, say, Jon drive Odie’s car, if you’re the sort of carefree anarchist for whom such reckless behaviour is likely to have you tearing chunks of flesh from your cheeks in pure unbridled hedonism. All the characters, tracks and cars are available at the start of the game so there’s nothing to unlock in that respect.
Indeed, the only unlockables are ‘comedy’ spoilers that can be put on the back of your car (here’s a spoiler: this isn’t getting a good score), and special hats that can be applied to your racer for extra bonuses. There’s a chef’s hat that makes your pie weapons travel faster, a Viking helmet that lets you use several lasagne power-ups in a row, and a cowboy hat that fixes all the game’s collision detection and improves its handling significantly, to the extent that it actually feels like a competent game. Okay, we lied: there’s no cowboy hat.
Which brings us to easily the most pressing issue with Furious Racing: it’s broken. Race around at the painfully slow 50cc setting and you shouldn’t notice too many issues, other than a handling system that’s hot garbage, with steering that’s nowhere near tight enough to get round many corners and a drift system that’s far too tight to be useful in every situation. Learn to cope with that, and you’ll have an issue-free time. Not a good time, to be clear, just a time that won’t have you uttering strings of obscenities that make you seem less “I hate Mondays” Garfield and more “I don’t like Mondays” Bob Geldof.
Step up to 100cc, however, and niggles start to appear. Play it on 150cc and it’s outright borked. This is a game that simply doesn’t feel like it’s been tested at these speeds, because there’s absolutely no way anyone could have played this for any length of time without noticing massive, game-breaking issues on a regular basis. In just our first hour with the game, we tumbled upside down simply for driving over a small bump, instantly snapped 180 degrees round after clipping the side of the road, ended up flipping sideways after brushing against a barrier and remaining that way for a good 15 seconds, and had all manner of odd results coming off jumps.
This isn’t an exaggeration: it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll finish a four-race Grand Prix without some sort of bizarre instance occurring that inevitably puts you at a disadvantage. This is a game that simply isn’t prepared to deal with fast-moving objects colliding with its scenery (or even its roads at times), and when fast things cause your game to exhibit more bugs than an early Pixar movie, a racing game’s the worst possible thing it could be.
If you're lucky enough to get through a race without strange collision issues, you're still unlikely to have a great time of things. The game has a tendency to trigger weapons extremely frequently, some of which you're powerless to avoid. The pillow weapon in particular hits all enemies and makes them fall asleep, reducing their kart to a crawl. While it may be welcome to have your kart go slow enough to avoid the possibility of falling through the scenery for once, when it happens four or five times in a race it's downright infuriating.
Even if you wanted to stick it out and struggle through the nonsense, there’s no real incentive to do so. As previously mentioned, every character, kart and track is readily available when you first boot the game, with the only unlockables being hats and spoilers. This is in stark contrast to the original Garfield Kart, which seemed to be built for a microtransaction system that was never implemented and resulted in you having to churn for up to 10 hours at a time to scrape enough coins together to unlock a single car. That’s no longer the case.
That isn’t necessarily a positive, though. We’ve gone from a game with unlockables that took a lifetime to earn, to one where almost everything is just handed to you at the start with no questions asked, and the remaining hats and spoilers can be unlocked by ‘simply’ winning races and Grands Prix (we say ‘simply’ because, of course, the game has that lovely tendency of frequently deciding: “Hmmm, I think I’d like you to fall through the track now, thanks.”)
You’re looking for a final insult to round this off, we can feel it. Something to really drive home the point that there’s nothing to salvage from this sorry affair. Well, put this in your exhaust pipe: at launch the Switch version is more than double the price of the same game on Steam. Even more bizarrely, there’s currently a Steam bundle where you can buy Furious Racing and the original Garfield Kart – which, remember, is what Furious Racing actually is, only more broken – for less than Furious Racing alone. As if they’re saying: “These games are so bad that the more you want, the less we can morally charge you”.
Conclusion
We always knew Garfield was something of a rebel, but taking a bad six-year-old game, making it even worse to play, pretending it’s a sequel and charging Switch owners more than double the price to suffer it is some pretty subversive stuff. The original Garfield Kart is extremely cheap on Steam: considering this is a more broken version of the same game, you might as well buy that instead. Even if you don’t have a PC, you’ll have wasted less money.
Comments 82
Garfield works best as a comic strip and also as TV shows and TV specials.
Um, hey Chris. You do know you just gave the undisputed Game of the Year Award recipiant.....a 2..........Did somebody not give you the memo or?.........
@RareFan The lorenzo music era along with Garfield And Friends show was the best thing to come from Garfield
And IGN rates it higher than Death Stranding
'That Garfield film with Bill Murray in it was quite good, wasn't it?'
...no.
Garfield has sadly been pretty much garbage on anything outside of the comics since the original Saturday morning animated series back in the 90's. RIP Lorenzo Music.
Zombieland said it best: 'Do you have any regrets?' 'Garfield, maybe'
Sorry, but that Garfield film with Bill Murray was pretty terrible.
@AngelFox Lol really?!
Aw man, I was hoping this would be the game to talk me out of getting Pokemon Shield. Oh welllllll
Licenced game turns out to be kitty litter ?
Say it aint so .
Oh, and the sky is blue apparantly.
@Rockmirth
Kinda ?
They give Death Stranding 6.8
https://www.ign.com/articles/death-stranding-review
Always looked poor, now we have confirmation.
I can't believe this game's review score was worse than Racing with Ryan
Looks fun, glad I pre-ordered
Lmao.
I'm sorry but I had to chuckle when I saw that score.
Looks like the Meme Lords are giving this game 10/10 over on Metacritic
@ummyeahnintendo Of course they are. First game would have gotten GOTY had it not been PC exclusive. This year them meme bois are ready to knock down everything else to get that game to a top spot.
Quite a shame. I genuinely wanted to try this one out. For one though, I had no idea if was just a remake of the original, and two, it seems pretty darn terrible. My hunger for a good garfield switch game continues.
Will someone please make a GOOD Garfield game/movie/series already? Cats only have nine lives and Garfield may not have much time left at this point.
@scully1888
"The original Garfield Kart is extremely cheap on Steam: considering this is a more broken version of the same game, you might as well buy that instead. Even if you don’t have a PC, you’ll have wasted less money."
That made me choke on my coffee this morning! Awesome!
I hope none of you miss out on the fact that we published this review on a Monday.
Fingers crossed for a Garfield Smash Bros clone. The likes of Heathcliff, James, Henry's etc could even guest star as overpriced DLC characters. It would be purr-fect.
You panned Nickelodeon kart racers last year and I bought it this week in the eshop sale for £13 and am honestly having fun with it so who knows.... Garfield can't be that bad right?
@scully you’ve killed my dreams.
I wanted this to be good.
I hate Monday’s even more now.
@USWITCH64 same here. Obviously it's not a Mario Kart, but it does have its own charm and at least features good controls.
Well, we all know that Garfield is lazy. Maybe the devs are lazy too? If they made a racing with me in it, then people would be Happy atleast. I give this game one meow out of five. Now, give me a cat treat, please.
This review fails to see the artistic integrity of the course design, character modelling and overall presentation both on a technical and visual level
The bland and empty designs of the tracks signify to the player that the entire game is actually taking place in Garfield's simple, feeble mind. It is an encapsulation of the core thinking patterns of the character, and his lust for laziness, as all he wants to do when he's not thinking about shipping Nermal in a box to Abu Dhabi, is sleep and lie on his stomach, and that he prefers if his life was never given any more variety to satiate his lack of enthusiasm.
The developers understood this and gave the tracks the most derivative and flat aesthetics which would only appeal to one organism's eye, Garfield himself, thus accentuating the developer's deep and entrenched understanding of the character and his core fundamentals.
I give this review a 2/10
GOTY 2019
Geoff Keighley can run, but he can't hide from true art
@RareFan Garfield works best when you minus Garfield.
Mario Kart 8 also had nothing to unlock except mostly-cosmetic tires and gliders. Really the biggest problem I had with it.
@patbacknitro18 Someone didn't get the bribe for a good review.
I'm sure Vinny (Vinesauce) will have a field day with this at least.
I for one am glad this game exists... because Scully’s reviews are always a good read.
As long as the Nazis don't get a hold of their precious twitter account to start another race riot we should be ok.
@nintendork64 yeah and the slime feature is cool too. Was amazed how fun it is considering all the sh?t reviews
@StormtheFrontier Garfield gets real was pretty decent and a welcomed return to animated Garfield.
That's it.
Wow. Imagine a world in which Race with Ryan isn't somehow the worst kart racer in the year of its release.
Am I alone wanting to know how Garfield Kart, stacks up against Hello Kitty Cruisers, and other less-than-great kart racers? Even if they are just mini reviews.
@tendonerd Why would you need a bribe for such a masterpiece?
@Ralizah
Terrifying that is.
GOTY 2019 and beyond
F U this is Day 1
It seems like this game is a....CATastrophe😉
Haedox wants to know your location.
One of the employees at my local Gamestop was trying to get people to buy this game because he was getting it and wanted someone to play with. He admitted that the game was probably garbage though. Guess he was more right than he knew.
...Must be better than that Ryan game, right?
@Woomy_NNYes funny you should say that, we had the same thought. There's a Hello Kitty review on the way from yours truly.
@Joeynator3000 everything is better than the Ryan one
Thanks! @scully1888
Hello Kitty(Switch) is a port of the Wii U Hello Kitty game? The Hello Kitty (Switch) profile has no review. I never would have known. I don't know if there's a way to point the Hello Kitty Switch profile to the Wii U profile review. If that goes against site format, I understand.
Yeah, I kind of have a morbid curiosity and want to see mini reviews of all the cheaper lower echelon Kart Racers If that's not an attractive topic for the site, I totally get that. Ever since I had fun with mediocre Meow Motors single player campaign, I've wondered how other cheap kart racers stack up.
Amazing - no-one seriously proposing an alternative score whether they've played it or not! Garfield unites in a way Brexit can only dream of...
@scully1888 and there was much rejoicing
It's always so funny reading a review like this.
I love the comic strips. Everything else seems to just be crappy though .
It would be cool if nintendolife made a video reviewing all the kart racers on switch in the same video. Would be interesting to see a group of people expressing their opinions about them all. I got burned earlier this year when I bought Meow Motors for $15. That game has to be worse than Garfield Kart
Of course this review comes out on a Monday.
The worse day for Garfield.
r/imsorryjon
But what we all want to know is does it have that great rubber banding we all know and love? I know it's terrible but how does it compare to Meow Motors (interestingly missing a review by NintendoLife)? I can grab Garfield Kart Furious Racing for $15 at Best Buy after a $10 giftcard reward and GCU discount, putting it in line with Meow Motors. Meow Motors was a fun game to play through once for this price point, though not as good as Mario Kart to go back to really ever again.
@RareFan
Exactly! The movies were bad, and most games involving him are horrible.
Comics and the classic tv series is it for me, anything else I skip.
Who asked for this crap?
Mario Kart now has some serious competition. This is going to be the Mario Kart killer app that Nintendo is afraid of. All of these accounts are all fakes Nintendo made to make this game look bad. Don't fall for communism, only follow the truth.
Just for the record, the Sega Genesis Garfield Caught in the Act ( Jump n Run ) game was pretty great, but thats like 25 years ago.
Nothing will ever top Mario Kart except Mario Kart
My question is why did they even make this? Who is the target audience? Do kids even know this character today? Did anyone ask for this?
Game is subtitled "Furious Racing".
Title character is grinning from ear to ear on the cover.
2/10 for misleading advertising.
I was really hoping a miracle would happen and this game would be at least decent. Part of me wants this game just for the LOLs. The screenshots actually looked appealing but the videos made it look very dull gameplay-wise. And watching the karts go around a turn seemed to defy all the laws of physics.
@Bolt_Strike That's possibly the saddest thing I've ever heard. That poor employee is probably about to lose his job because, well... GameStop. And all he wants is someone to play Garfield Karts with him as his life circles the drain.
finally, a kart racer for ME
Love the piss and vinegar in this review! Very well-written. Love the I Hate Mondays reference.
@scully1888 thank you for a hilarious review! Brightened up my morning. I’m looking forward to the next terrible game now so that you can humorously rip it apart in style.
Look out Mario Kart and Crash Team Racing, you have competition! XD
@ummyeahnintendo And that is while Metacrtic is a pile of * Sonic Spring Noise *.
@scully1888 What have you done to deserve the 'honour' of reviewing three terrible kart racing games in a matter of weeks? At least it means we get more of your excellent and punbelievably funny reviews, so it's not all bad. I've been reading your critiques of games since the ONM days and for me, you're one of the best in the business.
@TheRealKyleHyde Ah, cheers mate, I appreciate that. Over on my own site Tired Old Hack, I've got a regular feature called Kartography where I break down licensed karting games, so I've sort of carved a niche for myself as a karting expert. Think that's why Nintendo Life asked for my 'expertise' 😉
@ParasolStars Garfield the comic is garbage as well.
@scully1888
And you guys still have the link to the amazon page at the end of the review? The nerve.
Uh oh. Reddit won't be happy.
baffles me that these guys dont focus test the game and then get someone who was a team member on one of the Crash Or Mario Kart racing games to quality check this stuff because it looks like the underlying engine and assets are all ready to actually be part of a quality game.
@etherspin Unfortunately, it's not that baffling. It's clear that this game, along with Hello Kitty Racing, were thrown together with the smallest possible budget. If development costs are low enough, name recognition all but guarantees profit. Spending more to make a better game in theory could increase sales, but then again, with Mario, Sonic and Crash racing already out, maybe not.
OK, I bought this game just for the LOL's. It's not good, but considering how inflated NL's review scores are, a 2/10 seems unfair. It's a functional game and resembles what it's supposed to be at least. Mario Tennis Aces (8/10 according to NL) was not only an awful game, but it didn't even resemble tennis. I figure it at least deserves the same score (5/10) as the shoddy mess that is Bee Simulator or better yet, some of these other dudes get the same harsh score as Garfield. The 1-4 part of the rating scale needs to get used more often.
Hm, interesting review, especially the score.
The PC version is very solid. It works without problems and, as it was made mostly for kids in mind, there are many unlockables...
My nieces like to play this game.
It works great with combination of keyboard + gamepad (Xbox generic clone). It has 2, 3 and even 4 play local splitscreen! Local splitscreen in todays racing games are a very rare thing today.
I would give it at least 6/10.
I purchased this game. Its not that bad. There was a reasonable sized update that installed though, so perhaps that is what fixed it! I have definitely played worse...
he's just jealous he doesn't know how to drift
This is one of those games that yeah I know it's terrible, but I kinda want it anyway just to see how so😂
But Race with Ryan has 12 tracks, 6 being reverse, but there’s apparently a new version out with 4 new tracks which is laughable, more so when you consider it launched for £35. In my eyes, it was a £10 game. Even Fruit Racing had plenty of tracks and that was £10 on cart. These Mario Kart clones have become a rip off.
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