The video game industry can be a very strange place at times. It comes as no surprise that a free game from a well-known free mobile game studio has released an early access edition for EUR 25.99. And nothing would have happened if Gameloft’s aforementioned Disney Speedstorm was at least good.
These days, every cartoon, animated character, or game has its own Mario Kart-style racing game, and in recent years the subgenre has been peppered with rip-offs, some better than others. Little Big Planet Karting, Star Wars: Super Bombad Racing, Sonic Team Racing, Crash Nitro Racing, Kartrider, Warped Kart Racers are just a small selection of them and now Disney has entered the scene which is no surprise. No one owns as many rights and has created more world-famous movie characters than Disney, and when they announced just over a year ago that they had brought together the fictional Wreck-It-Ralph film Sugar Rush starring Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Jack Sparrow , the beast, woody and everyone else in a mario kart clone, i had no doubt i had to be there to prove it.
Gameloft is a veteran studio that has developed almost exclusively racing games for our mobile phones, and its Asphalt series of games is very popular today, currently with the ninth installment active. With Disney Speedstorm, they’ve largely taken the gameplay from Asphalt 9: Legends, shrinking the tracks and replacing the debris with Disney-style minicars, sort of a hybrid of F-Zero’s ships and Mario’s Kart 8 maps.
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The setup is identical to that of Mario Kart. eight pilots, each in a kart, drive you through short tracks with different types of Disney themed (inspired by different Disney movies and worlds). There are blocks with weapons and power-ups at four points on each track and of course you have to drive fast, dodge your opponents, pick up weapons and shoot the drivers in front of you. Super easy and of course straight from Mario Kart. Gameloft also introduced other elements taken straight from Mario Kart 8 like the Drift feature (which is simpler but activates in exactly the same way) and the ability to use specific energy fields (light blue ) at certain selected locations on the tracks to drive through walls.
The difference is that Disney Speedstorm is a free game designed as a live service, which means everything costs money and everything is locked from the start. Mickey is available and seems to be the “jack of all trades” character in the game, while everything else is locked and must be unlocked through game time or real money. And it’s a shame, as always, that there isn’t something as simple as straight-forward, no-fuss gameplay where you just pick a driver and drive, without so much fuss.
70% of the promised Disney characters are also currently missing, meaning they will appear in “seasons” throughout the year. Personally, I’m sick and tired of this type of arrangement and I really don’t want to play Goofy for nine hours.
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I also don’t like how this game feels once you’re in the running. The physics are terrible and the car always seems to hover an inch off the ground. He drifting is too easy, which makes it boring, and the tracks lack all of the charm, variety, and fun tricks you’ll find in Mario Kart 8. Disney Speedstorm is also too slow in the first two classes, even if you’re drifting and pressing power-ups to get ahead of it’s competition. It feels like the brake is “half pressed” all the time, which is frustrating and has never happened to me in Mario Kart 8, for example, where even 50cc racing is fun and quite challenging.
I don’t really like the way he looks either. The design is nothing but what I would call a failure, as the colorful charm of the Disney world has gone a little too gray and a little too impersonal here. For example, the appearance of Jack Sparrow or Belle from Beauty and the Beast is reminiscent of poorly implemented versions of Disney Infinity and is undesirable in combination with mobile game-like graphics technology. Speedstorm looks good on PlayStation 5, although the tracks look too “wet”. On the Switch, the frame rate often drops to around ten frames per second (down from 30), making this almost unplayable in my world on Nintendo’s console.
I really wanted to like Disney Speedstorm as I love Mario Kart 8: Deluxe, I love Sonic Team Racing and I really like Crash Nitro Racing. But I can not. Soulless, unimaginative, and silly in its design, it’s nothing more than a way for Gameloft and Disney to make a quick buck from an ever-growing subgenre. My eight-year-old wasn’t the least bit impressed yesterday, and he left the couch after just three races, which in many ways could be the worst judgment this game will receive.
