You have to be mad to release a kart racing game on a Nintendo platform knowing full well that comparisons to Mario Kart are sure to follow. Unfortunately, nobody told this to the people behind All-Star Fruit Racing because they went ahead and released this one anyways.
On the surface All-Star Fruit Racing is your basic kart racing video game. You have a collection of characters in their vehicles racing around all manner of crazy tracks. You zoom about collecting power-ups that you can use against your fellow racers. It’s not a complicated concept and one that should be easy enough to implement.
Nintendo is the king in this genre, but that isn’t to say that other studios aren’t nipping at their heels. Sega, with the help of Sumo Digital, have their own series that many consider better than Mario Kart, and even Crash Bandicoot has a racer that many consider the best of the genre.
So if you are going to step into someone else’s playground you better bring something new to the experience, or at least try to match the quality of other racers on the system. Luckily All-Star Fruit Racing does one of these two things; unfortunately that isn’t enough to hang an entire game on.
All-Star Fruit Racing isn’t a great driving experience, nowhere close to Mario Kart or Sonic All-Star Racing Transformed, but where it does mix things up is in its use of items. Like other kart racing games you drive over items which you can then use, but how you do this makes All-Star Fruit Racing interesting. Not better, but interesting to be sure.
Each track either has question mark bubbles or four type of fruit bubbles. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the choice of this implementation, but I assume it has something to do with the track layout, even though I couldn’t really see it myself.
In tracks with fruit icons you can collect four different types. As you collect each type of fruit they will fill that fruits specific tank on screen. These tanks then fill a main mixing tank and depending how much of each you collect the power-up will change or become more powerful.
It’s an interesting idea that has a lot of potential but it ends up being more confusing than anything. What each power-up does isn’t clear until to try them out and their impact often also leaves you scratching your head. There were times things hit and didn’t seem to do much of anything to other racers. And because they aren’t super fun to use there really isn’t a strategy with the fruit mixing system.
In tracks with only the question mark bubbles the game plays much like Mario Kart. When you drive over one a slot machine will spin and give you a random power-up. Sure, it’s a lot more basic but it just works better in practice because it keeps you focused on the actual racing. Each character also has one unique power-up they can pull which is nice.
But it’s when you focus on the racing where things really fall apart for All-Star Fruit Racing. I need to note that the game features a “reset” button that you can press to place your kart back on the track. I can’t remember the last time I saw a “feature” like this in generations, seeing it usually reserved for a broken game that knows it has collision issues that lets the player get themselves stuck.
Driving also doesn’t feel quite right/tight. Everything is quite loose and leads to wide, swinging arcs of motion. To mitigate this you can hit the left trigger and do a jump turn that snakes, much like old Mario Kart, but this over-corrects you more often than not. You aren’t playing the game more than you are fighting against the game.
And while I don’t think there is an sort of rubber-banding –I could be wrong and probably am– the A.I. will wreck you because it doesn’t have to fight itself. This means winning a race is difficult but not in a fun or challenging way. The very first race out, and the entirety of the first cup, I simply couldn’t win a race to save my life. Learning how All-Star Fruit Racing plays takes far too long.
Graphically, All-Star Fruit Racing has a cute look but it isn’t pushing the console and has more of the feel of a late PS2 era game in docked mode. The opening cinematic looks like it’s being shown through an old tube TV and the fruit atheistic comes off as bland. Each female racer is based on a fruit, but only sort off. Thankfully the world is a fun one and does pop for often than not.
Character wise no one is memorable and I’m fighting to recall a single racer from a visual perspective outside the really short, cute, strawberry girl; at least I think she was the strawberry one (Edit: she wasn’t). If I’m being honest All-Star Fruit Racing looks and plays like a mobile port that’s been upscaled for home consoles.
I think this might be the case because of the weird technical issues the game has. Loading screens takes ages, so much so I thought the game had froze several times. Controls aren’t built around the Nintendo Switch with me nearly dislocating my pinky playing on the JoyCons seperated from the Switch.
You use the ZR trigger to go, which is fine, but to use the items you need to click the joystck in on the same JoyCon. Grab your JoyCon right now and place your index finger on the ZR trigger and then stretch your thumb to press the joystick. It’s uncomfortable under the best conditions and nearly unplayable with JoyCons undocked.
There are just so many little things that bring down the experience. The wheels on the karts also sometime spin at different rates than the speed of your kart causing headaches, at least for me, and the whole package just has that mobile game feel. Then when the game loads in handheld mode the screen wont fill completely letting you see what is underneath on the side trim of the Switch screen.
And that’s all before getting to the utterly terrible audio mixing All-Star Fruit Racing has. Everything starts fine but the announcer audio track peaks off the scale when a race starts to the point you’ll think your speakers have blown out. The levels are a mess and sound effects and music fight for attention over and under each other. And the music isn;t memorable or designed around each fun track, simply playing generic stock feeling tunes.
There simply isn’t any reason for All-Star Fruit Racing to exist, at least not on a Nintendo platform that has Mario Kart on it. On a mobile device I could see this one being a pretty fun experience but spending $30 for a cartridge is something that I can’t recommend anyone do, at least not on Switch.
On the surface All-Star Fruit Racing looks like a charming Mario Kart alternative that parents are sure to snap up for their kids only to have their kids sit them down and explain to them that they made a bad life choice. All-Star Fruit Racing works, but only barely and in weird ways.
But what sucks the most is that there is a lot here that could be fantastic. It’s clear that the developers put a lot of time and work into the title, but it just feels like so much of it went into the wrong places. The customization feature is great, but what’s the point if the driving is so weak. This is made worse because the tracks look great and are visually a lot of fun.
Everything also just looks and plays better in handheld mode, so clearly there is something here. When on the TV I didn’t have much fun, but when puttering about in handheld mode I actually managed to enjoy a lot of the game. It’s a very weird thing to experience for a sinlge game to feel so different from screen to handheld.
The game features tons of characters, even for a kart racer, but none of them are unique enough to be memorable. Instead of a bunch more fruit-based ladies I wish the team spent more time on making them really stand out, even if that meant less of them.
The game also has a bunch of neat modes that play on the fruit style which have potential. But then there’s the online multiplayer that is dead. Games like these live and die thanks to their online multiplayer to keep people playing, but All-Star Fruit Racing is already dead and I couldn’t find a single game during my time with the game.
All-Star Fruit Racing is a good effort that could set up better games down the line, but right now we say to stay away from this one unless they throw a huge digital sale and you can grab it for a few bucks.
Final Score:
2/5
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