HomeReviews4/5 ReviewNickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway Review

Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway Review

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The podium for ‘Best Karting Game’ has a clear contender for number one, but not so much for two and three. It’s not for want of trying: this year alone, we’ve played PAW Patrol: Grand Prix, Renzo Racer and Starlit Kart Racing, and we can be sure that more will follow. But there is no clear winner in Mario Kart’s chasing pack, and that feels like an opportunity. 

We’re going to guess that BamTang Games, developers of Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway, feel the same way. They’ve taken the Nickelodeon Kart Racers – a decent also-ran – and reworked it from the ground up. Checking our review for the second game in the series, they’ve also addressed most of our core issues. And most of all, they’ve outfitted a racer that, for our money, takes the second spot with gusto. 

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If we were to sell Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway to you, it would go down like this: where Mario Kart nails the immediacy and accessibility that you want from a karting game, Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway is a karting game as a treasure trove. It’s absolutely bursting at the seams with things to unlock, stuff to play, racers to master and karts to optimise. It embarrasses other racers through the sheer amount of stuff it has to offer.

That’s not to say that the basics aren’t present and accounted for. There’s four-player co-op out of the box, and we had no issue with lag or slowdown. Twelve players can play online, and – while we had a few issues finding a game – there’s no issues to be found here either. 

The racing feels great. We have some personal niggles with the drifting, which is temperamental and ungenerous, refusing to activate although we did everything right, but the driving has all the weight and speed that you’d want from the genre. We’ll wheel out another issue, which is that car collision is unnecessarily punitive (sidle up to a car and you will both noisily bounce around the arena), but the vast majority of our time with Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway was spent in that zen, blinkered state where we were fully concentrating on the road. It sits in the sweet spot where the rubber-banding is clearly there, but not to the degree that you feel shackled by it. 

Brownie points also come in the form of the improved accessibility. Like PAW Patrol: Grand Prix and Mario Kart 8, there is an auto-drive mode, which allows the younger racers in our house to participate by accelerating and steering for them. There’s an attached problem, that the rest of Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway is relatively complicated – the kart creation, the pit crew, the slime speedways – making the game-proposition unsuitable for younger players, but it’s an undeniable virtue for the less able. 

Weapons are numerous, almost to the degree of being bewildering. There are plenty, from gnomes to beach balls to shields, and they all have an upgraded variant if you collect enough slime. Unleashing a super-charged gnome is quite the sight, as dozens of looming gnomes appear on the track, creating the oddest of slaloms. While you could be cynical and highlight the lack of anything particularly new in Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway’s roster, it’s time we admit that there’s only so much you can do with a karting weapon arsenal. 

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And then there’s the sheer number of options for who you play, and how you support them. Let us take you through the sequence of customisations you  make on your car before you jump into a race: first, you choose your racer (forty of them, all with differing stats); then choose whether to have a kart or bike; the brand of kart or bike; its wheels; exhaust pipe; paint job; chief; and two crew engineers. That’s nine choices before you are unleashed on the grid. 

Controversial opinion here, but it’s too much. There’s the sheer amount of time that you spend in these screens, for one, particularly when you have four players optimising and taking their merry old time. Then there’s the sheer cognitive load. If you have a lot unlocked (to be fair to Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway, you have a limited array to choose from in the opening moments), then you can be utterly paralysed by the amount of choice on offer. Chiefs are particularly important to get right, pilfering from Rocko’s Modern Life, Spongebob Squarepants, Rugrats and more to offer characters who will boost, defend or attack if you gain enough slime on the track. Then there are two crew engineers who supplement you with passive abilities, and the effects can synergise to create something unbeatable. That is, if you pay attention, and therein lies the problem.

On single-player, however, this intricacy can be a boon. Choosing and refining your kart and its crew is a joy for a strategist, and there’s less issue in taking too much time. As you play Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway, you gain slime currency from positioning well, but also completing associated track objectives – things like performing stunts over jumps, or completing a lap in second place – and these can be spent in the game’s Garage. Here, even more racers, chiefs and paint jobs can be purchased. This isn’t a system that you’re going to exhaust in  Saturday night binge. There is enough here to make the achievement for unlocking everything a zero-percenter. At the time of writing, no one in the world has unlocked it. 

Underlying all of this is a bevy of game modes, far superior than any other karter. Slime Scramble host a dozen grand prix cups (courses are inventive and leverage the Nickelodeon worlds extremely well); Free Race is your conventional run-around; Time Trial has you playing against a ghost NPC in an attempt to reach a high score; Challenges require you to pull off a feat in exchange for cosmetic rewards; and Arena is a fully featured battle mode. Here, you can face off locally or online against other players in four different scenarios all pilfered, in some way, from multiplayer FPSs. There’s a Splatoon-like territory grab, a Grab the Flag mode that replaces the flag with a golden spatula, and more. 

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And then there’s the refinement, the details that tie the package up with a bow. In our Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2 review, we lamented the lack of voice-acting, which made the proceedings oddly artificial. It felt like merchandise rather than a game set in the Nickelodeon universe, if such a thing exists. Here, we have all the official voice-acting (in some cases, not a good thing: Garfield’s drawl sets our teeth on edge), and suddenly the game feels alive. The licensed tie-in sheen falls away, and suddenly you’re playing with your favourite characters. Aang, Squidward, Ren & Stimpy, April O’Neil, Zim – they’re all here. 

If we’re being critical, the headline update – the Slime Speedways of the title – are throwaway and a tad naff. These are flume-like slides that act as alternate paths or shortcuts (something which Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway does extremely well, as you’re unlikely to follow the same path on each lap), and they send you boosting around loop-the-loops like you were Sonic the Hedgehog. But they’re also on-rails, which makes them somewhat uninteractive. You have to tap LB to jump over the odd hurdle, but mainly they reduce the intensity of a race, not increase them. 

But what an embarrassment of riches Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway has turned out to be. Previously something of an also-ran in the race to be the best karting experience, it can proudly take its place at the top of the podium on the Xbox – second only to Mario Kart on all platforms. No other karting game can match its depth, and the actual racing is breakneck and fully-featured too. It doesn’t matter if Spongebob Squarepants means nothing to you: there’s enough charm and generosity to make this a winner regardless.

You can buy Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway from the Xbox Store

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James Nigel Davie
James Nigel Davie
1 year ago

Somebody hasn’t played Sonic and Sega’s All-Stars Racing: Transformed

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