There are cynical licensed games and then there are those that make perfect sense. While Multiverse is surprisingly good, we are not convinced that we needed to watch Shaggy beat Batman. But a go-kart game with the eternal four-wheeled PAW Patrol? That makes a lot of sense. It may be a money making vehicle (haha!), but it is one that has a right to exist.
What also makes sense is that the Xbox, although there is no shortage of kart gamesisn’t particularly well stocked with kart games made for younger players. Race with Ryan is a flawed and shonky attempt at it, but PAW Patrol: Grand Prix focuses on the bullseye and doesn’t get far from it.
Time to sing one of his hymns. PAW Patrol: Grand Prix includes an auto-drive mode. If someone with a three year old sees a family playing together and absolutely demands that she join in, this is a life saver. It drives ahead of her, occasionally correcting course so that she doesn’t see Adventure Bay from behind a guardrail. It’s not new – Mario Kart 8 pioneered it – but so few games are taking over. Bravo to PAW Patrol: Grand Prix for recording here.
Everything your little ones could want from a karting game in the PAW Patrol franchise is there and correct. The main cast of pups are here, plus Ryder, and it won’t take long to unlock Everest, Tracker, and Rex. There might have been room for Liberty from the latest movie, or some of the peripheral characters (Chickaletta may only ring the starting bell, natch), but it’s the heavy hitters, plus a few more, all in their famously recognizable vehicles.
They are all voiced, as far as we can tell, including by the British cast. Watch PAW Patrol on YouTube and you know all too well that there are regional voices and Mayor Humdinger just sounds wrong in the US version. But here’s the effort to locate and get these voices right. They only appear in little cutscenes and the occasional chatter in the cars, but it gives PAW Patrol: Grand Prix some authenticity.
Best of all, PAW Patrol: Grand Prix is four-player plus co-op on the couch. As long as you have four gamepads and the same number of willing pups, you can all play together and not sacrifice much like you do. It’s the bare minimum for a karting game, but you’d be surprised how many people get punched in the face by this hurdle.
So the core is just as reliable as Chase, but the rest is bordering on lightweight. For example, there aren’t many ways to play PAW Patrol: Grand Prix. The closest thing to a Mario Kart-style campaign or Grand Prix is the curiously limited Adventure mode. Here you can play seventeen songs in a row, but you can only play them for one player and they are not broken up into smaller chunks. You can return to your save at any time, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to break it down into manageable bites of some form?
Outside of the bizarre marathon that is Adventure mode, there are fast races, which choose the track and character for you (Bizarre again: what a discerning PAW Patrol fan should not wanting to choose their character), and finally – and luckily – a Custom Race, where you can choose the track AND the character, as well as play multiplayer (but only locally, which makes sense given the age rating).
There are twelve tracks with the option to switch them to night or day, whereas we would have taken a mirror mode instead. Those twelve tracks are four ‘themes’ spread over fairly similar layouts. Jungle, Adventure Bay, snow and some kind of beachy flavor is all you get here, and it’s not quite enough. With some flat course designs, handicapped in that they also need to be simple for younger players, they manage to sharpen the sense of repetition. Playing those seventeen songs in a row in Adventure mode will feel immensely familiar. Kind of like watching the episodes as an adult, viz.
While the songs border on the bland (some shortcuts help spice things up a bit), the controls are robust. The cars drive well, and they drive even better when you find out that RT is a power slide with a boost as a payout; the game doesn’t really tell you it’s there. There’s also a nice two-weapon system, which echoes Outright Games’ other racer, Fast & The Furious: Spy Racers Rise of Sh1ft3r. You can collect Mario Kart-style weapons such as boosts, jams and tornadoes that circle around your kart, but you can also collect puppy candies that will eventually unlock your dog’s signature attack.
Ryder has a shield to stop attacks (a typical casual attack from ol’ goody two shoes), while Skye has a flying helicopter boost and Tracker uses his toolkit to grab the person in front. Each puppy has a character-appropriate ability, and while they vary in quality (Tracker’s only works if one is up front which isn’t great in the first place), they are varied and give the puppies some individuality.
That said, there’s a blue shell in PAW Patrol: Grand Prix, and it’s just as bad as in that Mario game we’ve alluded to too much. It’s a tractor beam that slows you down to a crawl that turns out to be worse than getting hit. Moving at 2 km/h doesn’t feel right, unsurprisingly.
Overall, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a lot of rubber banding in PAW Patrol: Grand Prix. We found that the three difficulty levels were very important to us as seasoned kart players. Whichever we chose, Marshall or another pup would be behind us, ready to catch up if we got hit by the blue grenade, sorry, tractor beam. PAW Patrol: Grand Prix is certainly prone to a bit of undeserved-to-lose-itis, which is fine, if not great, if you want to give little ‘uns a chance to win, but it makes it unsatisfactory if you’re chasing the perfect Adventure Mode for an achievement.
Nothing in the weapons arsenal is particularly noteworthy (a confetti bomb is a cute articulation of the screen-choking weapon, but that’s about the culmination of it), but we have to keep rewiring ourselves: this is child’s play, and kids aren’t nearly as discerning. Watching our three-year-old’s beaming face as she finishes in second place with Skye, well, that’s kinda priceless, isn’t it?
For a younger player who dreams of jumping into the fire truck with Marshall, PAW Patrol: Grand Prix gets so much good. It can handle four players at once; they are the right puppies with the right voices. To top it off, it has an auto-drive feature so all your little one has to do is poke an analog stick. This is not obvious: it is incredibly rare.
For everyone else? Maybe we shouldn’t care. There’s enough here to make playing four-player anything but a chore, and what if it can’t stand the scrutiny of a single-player adult? It’s not made for us. Not really.
Take the testimonial of two PAW Patrol fans in our home – PAW Patrol: Grand Prix is in full swing.
You can buy PAW Patrol: Grand Prix at the Xbox store
There are cynical licensed games and then there are those that make perfect sense. While Multiversus is surprisingly good, we’re not convinced we needed to see Shaggy thrashing Batman. But a go-kart game with the eternal four-wheeled PAW Patrol? That makes a lot of sense. It may be a way to make money (haha!), but it’s one that has a right to exist. Which also makes sense is that, while there’s no shortage of kart games, the Xbox isn’t particularly well-stocked with kart games made for younger players. Race With Ryan is a flawed and shonky attempt, but…
PAW Patrol: Grand Prix Review
PAW Patrol: Grand Prix Review
2022-10-03
Dave Ozzy
Advantages:
- Local four-player co-op
- All the puppies you could want
- A solid karting experience
cons:
- Bizarre lack of game modes
- Extremely familiar feeling
- Really only joyful for young ‘uns’
Information:
- Thank you for the free copy of the game go to – Bought by TXH
- Formats – Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, Switch, PC
- Version Reviewed – Xbox Series X
- Release Date – September 30, 2022
- Introductory price from – £34.99
TXH score
3.5/5
Advantages:
- Local four-player co-op
- All the puppies you could want
- A solid karting experience
cons:
- Bizarre lack of game modes
- Extremely familiar feeling
- Really only joyful for young ‘uns’
Information:
- Thank you for the free copy of the game go to – Bought by TXH
- Formats – Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, Switch, PC
- Version Reviewed – Xbox Series X
- Release Date – September 30, 2022
- Introductory price from – £34.99
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