If you have an Xbox and a younger player in your house, there is a very good chance that you have played a title published by Outright Games. They’re responsible for anything with a PAW Patrol label slapped on the front, as well as PJ Masks, Peppa Pig, the How to Train Your Dragon games, the L.O.L. series and more.
It’s mildly interesting that Outright Games have changed their approach of late. Instead of releasing game after game, they have been returning to some of their recently released titles to supplement them with DLC. Rarely over a fiver, these expansion packs bring new levels, characters and tracks, and they top up interest on games that your goblins might have abandoned.
Which brings us neatly to PAW Patrol: Grand Prix – Race in Barkingburg, which adds three new tracks to the core game for a slightly steeper £5.99. If you have PAW Patrol nerds in the house, but haven’t played PAW Patrol: Grand Prix, then we’d suggest that perhaps you should. It’s on Game Pass now, lowering the barrier for playing it, and we gave it a 3.5/5 in review, highlighting, in particular, its commendable accessibility, allowing younger players to auto-drive their way through its tracks.
PAW Patrol: Grand Prix – Race in Barkingburg should be a home run, then. The core game is now the de facto racing experience on Xbox for anyone under the age of, say, seven, and that’s a valuable niche. Yet, while it’s perfectly molded for the hands of a youngster, it’s not exactly overflowing with stuff to do, so the opportunity to top up the tank is welcome. Three more tracks? We’ll take it.
It should be a home run. But PAW Patrol: Grand Prix – Race in Barkingburg is far from it, instead scuffing the ball and getting run out on first base. While this is a three-track boost, those tracks are anything but special, and they’re implemented in a way that completely bamboozles us. We can’t fathom why Outright Games decided to implement them the way they did.
The tracks first: there are three here, namely Barkingburg Journey, Barkingburg City Race and The Royal Circuit. They have a faintly English theme, with a Big Ben-style clock looming over a set of town-based tracks. The problem here is that Barkingburg Journey and City Race are stupendously similar, being almost mirrors of each other. We found ourselves making wrong turns in the track, simply because we’d muddled the two together. They even end the same way, with a bridge leading to a long straight, and there’s no real landmark or interesting route through them. They’re well below the standard set by the rest of the game.
Coming to the rescue is The Royal Circuit. This ditches the town theming for a romp around a castle, and it got us reminiscing about old Bowser’s Castle tracks, albeit without lava and a giant spiky tortoise in the middle. It’s frustratingly short, but the track actually goes up and down, rather than just left and right, would you believe, so it’s at least besting the two tracks that preceded it.
As an offering, they’re a rather slimline bundle, and they stand out against the other tracks. Which is presumably why Outright Games decided to give them their own section on the game menu. It’s the only reason we can come up with for such a bizarre and player-unfriendly decision.
To be clearer, the three new tracks are housed in their own section of the game. They can’t be found in the Adventure campaign, nor can they be selected from to make a Custom grand prix. You can’t mix them up with the other tracks in a play session at all. If you want to follow up a track from the main game with one of Barklingburg’s, then you’ll have to exit and start all over again. It’s utterly bewildering. We’re not being theatrical: we genuinely did a double-take and grumbled at the screen when we realised.
There are six new vehicles, says the press release, but you’d struggle to find them. They are alternate sports-car vehicles for the main characters of PAW Patrol, all themed around the PAW Patrol: Ready, Race, Rescue movie, accessed by pressing Y on each pup. They don’t have any new weapons, and there’s certainly no new pups, so don’t get overly excited. They’re glorified skins for a game that already had its fair share of skins, so they just get tossed on top of the pile.
There’s a gap where other additions could have been. There are no new characters, no new weapons, and no new campaigns (we’d have happily taken an Adventure that folded in the new tracks, mirrored them and applied different weather to them, but alas something as simple as that isn’t even in the package). It’s all rather ho-hum, and that ho-hum is probably being kind.
For £5.99, you are getting three tracks, but we’d probably argue you down to two-and-a-half. Only one does anything new, slotting in a castle for you to dive beneath. PAW Patrol: Grand Prix – Race in Barkingburg is the most threadbare of DLC, yet it’s supplementing one of Outright Games’ best titles. The mismatch hurts, and we can’t help but feel that Mayor Humdinger and the Catastrophe Crew have run away with the rest of the package.
You can buy PAW Patrol: Grand Prix: Race in Barkington from the Xbox Store
