If you’re making a karting game but not got the money to splash on a licence, you can do a lot worse than choosing rubber ducks. There’s clearly something timeless about them, as our kids were more excited to play this than any Garfield, Gigantosaurus or Nickelodeon kart racer. In my case, I was whipped up in some Wave Race, Hydro Thunder nostalgia, and was well up for riding the waves to victory. Either way, there were four players eager to play this one.
We were almost excited enough to forget the £24.99 price tag. It’s the same mistake that Joindots made with emoji Kart Racer: slapping an incredibly high, unjustifiable price tag on a karting game that’s too meager to make it worthwhile. Or maybe it’s not a mistake, as they’re making that mistake for a second time. There’s every chance they know more than we do.
In many ways, Rubberduck Wave Racer is everything you would hope it to be. It’s four-player locally (no online multiplayer, natch, but we suspect we wouldn’t be getting a game if it was included), with sixteen tracks that are all refreshingly different from each other. Those tracks are the basic template of a Mario Kart, allowing enough familiarity to creep in that anyone could pick up a pad and understand what they need to do. But the tracks have been flooded with water, and it’s through the eddies and currents of that liquid that Rubberduck Wave Racer feels original. At least, if you’re not old enough to be brought up on Wave Race 64.
Squint, and there’s a pretty good karting game here. It’s particularly true of the levels, which are leaps and bounds beyond those in emoji Kart Racer. They move around in a true 3D space, sloshing around corners and pouring over waterfalls. There are secret routes that – confusingly – aren’t always beneficial. And they’re all dressed differently, as we found ourselves powersliding around water parks, volcanic caverns and what seems to be a Sealife Centre. Even the liquid changes. We’re not sure we’ll ever get to race on milk again.
But lose the squint and focus a little, and you’ll find a water-based karting game that’s overloaded with issues. You can’t move for them. After every corner, you will donk into a new one.
We’ve never had to dodge ramps in a karting game before. If you hit a jump you will be ridiculously airborne, but the huge leap you make will be slower than racing there yourself. Worst still, once you land, you’re a skipping stone, moving again at a more limited speed, with the added bonus of being out of control. The camera also sticks to the backside of your duck, so you can’t see where you are going. Basically, hitting a ramp is a surefire way to lose places, so you end up avoiding them as much as possible. Which – we’ll guess – is not what the designers intended.
Hit a wall, and you’ll become one with it. You’re now a wall-duck hybrid, screaming ‘kill me’ at the passing opponents. We’re not sure why Rubberduck Wave Racer can’t handle wall collisions, but it panics and scrunches you into a single rubbery mass that you can’t get out of. All you can do is press B to respawn.
Respawning gets to become a hell of a drug. When you respawn, you are moving fast, if not faster than you were before, with virtually no difference in placing. It’s entirely possible to win a race by spamming the respawn button. It’s not a problem we’ve encountered in a karter before: it’s so unpunishing with its respawn button that you soon learn to press it immediately after any hit whatsoever so that you lose zero ground. It’s all a bit of a cheat.
We’ve listed off a few of the curiosities that are the building blocks of Rubberduck Wave Racer. It’s hard to say that it’s a bad game for all of these quirks, since you can adapt and live with them. But it’s so idiosyncratically odd as a result, to the degree that we wouldn’t get some mates round to play it: we’d have to print out a cribsheet so they could understand its weirdnesses.
Take the cornering. Pressing brake is for fools. If you ever press brake, you are in a sudden stop and it will take many, many seconds for you to return to top speed. Instead, you’re letting go of the accelerator, which manages to keep your speed where it was, yet improve the handling. There are no downsides to taking your foot off the gas and sliding around a corner. Again, you learn it, but you wonder why it was like that in the first place.
It makes Rubberduck Wave Racer something of an eccentric dandy, which was less than ideal for our kids. They bounced off it like rubber, ironically. The first level is, befuddlingly, one of the most difficult, with lots of sharp turns, and Rubberduck Wave Racer does not do sharp turns well. There were constant wrong turns, grinding against walls (and becoming one with them, kill meeee) and failure, simply because they hadn’t learned to take the foot off the gas on corners, spam the respawn button, and countless other bizarro tactics. And who would know that? There’s certainly no adequate tutorial. You have to come to these conclusions yourself.Â
Scoring Rubberduck Wave Racer is tough. It presents as a stock Mario Kart racer, albeit with ducks on a log flume. But play it as Mario Kart, and you will end up jackknifing into corners and losing plenty. Learn what it wants from you, however – and what it wants will often make very little sense – and there’s fun to be found.
Avoiding jumps, plowing through obstacles, ignoring weapons and respawning like your life depended on it: these are not the actions of a sane karter. But master Rubberduck Wave Racer’s arcane arts and you have a surprisingly well-stocked racing game. It’s still nowhere near worth that £24.99, though.
