With a few exceptions – Excitebike: World Rally and Heracles: Chariot Racing chief among them – WiiWare is pretty thin on family-friendly, well-received racing titles, so the thinking behind Mister Bumblebee Racing Champion is clear. Sadly, the best thing about this game is likely to be its title.
The key twist here is that all the characters fly rather than stick to a track. Your speed is set with a bar, meaning you can hold until the bar fills then release and concentrate on navigating, which in the default control scheme is handled by the D-Pad. This digital method of steering is predictably jerky and imprecise, but switching to motion controls is just as twitchy and with no sensitivity options you're left bumping from one object to another until you've wrangled the controls down.
Once the controller is obeying you you're able to delve into the available game modes. To its credit, there's more than just simple time attacks here, with Ghost, Knockout and Countdown modes included to offer some extra longevity. One thing that's sorely missing, however, is any form of championship or cup mode, resulting in lots of one-off races without any real thread to connect them together.
The rest of the game suffers from similarly curious design choices that presumably stem from its heritage as an iPhone title. Each track is completely bordered, meaning you can never venture off-road for shortcuts or power-ups, severely limiting the amount of freedom at your fingertips. Touching another racer destroys your character whilst leaving the other insect intact, and although there are items to collect they don't spice up the very basic formula.
There is at least a range of options to liven up proceedings, with four-player racing supported and options to increase the number of available power-ups and even speed the game up to a manic pace. Sadly the increased speed doesn't make it a better game, though it does inject a little excitement into the otherwise too-slow races. One of the game's major problems is it never feels as though you're competing: with three opponents and no physical interaction between them there's no satisfaction in jostling for position, leaving the game feeling a bit sterile.
The game fares better graphically than many other iPhone to Wii transitions – please stand up, WarMen Tactics – but it suffers from bland textures and very basic character modelling that removes any life from the racers, not to mention the butterfly's massive wings obscuring where you're going. It's a similarly poor performance on the audio side, with repetitive music and sound effects that you'll likely want to switch off as soon as possible.
Conclusion
For 500 Points it's hard to be too critical of this game: its only crime is to be mediocre. Ultimately, however, the poor presentation, lacklustre design and dull racing conspires to drag poor old Mister Bumblebee down.
Comments 17
The review makes it sound worse than the score suggests and the score is higher than I expected it to be.
Hmm, turned out better than I expected.
As I expected... boring.
With a name like Mister Bumblebee Racing Champion, did ANYONE expect it to be good?
I wasn't holding my breathe for a good score, I'll say that much. I'll Pass on this one.
A port of an iphone game ends up being terrible? Whoulda thunk it?
I want more racers on WiiWare (Just not this one!)
Please no more iPhone to WiiWare transitions. The iPhone store can keep its fail to itself!
It sure does look like a buzz kill.
Huh, score was higher than I thought, but the review sounds pretty much right.
No surprise too me.
I wish this game would buzz off.
Disappointment sure stings.
@offensive That mask...
rocks slowly in a corner
As excpeted, it's shovelware.
Oh well, at least it's better than SPOGs Racing (3 stars). A 3 minute race in that game felt like 3 hours, while a 3 minute MarioKart race feels like 3 seconds. Devs don't give 2 cents about quality; Wiiware is a quick cash cow for them.
It's boring. Interesting only the first 10 minutes.
Really too bad, sounds like an awesome idea. I feel like there is a racing game void right now. You have Mario Kart Wii and several wannabes and anything trying to use realism in any degree falls short.
ModNation Racers sounds very promising. Maybe when I get a PS3 I can get it. I thoroughly enjoyed LBP, so I have a lot of hope in this new trend of user created content (and I have been arguing ever since Mario Kart Wii that it would be nice if the game had added longevity either through expansions (maybe DLC) or UCC).
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