GAMES Review: Disney Super Speedway

hmmm… This was an interesting play through. When I first started the game and was learning the controls I was almost ready to write it off as just a cheap Mario Kart clone with Disney character skins. But as I played through Super Speedway I quickly realized a few key things that pushed it further then just being the run of the mill kart game clone.

Now seeing how this is a kart game no contextual story this time obviously but we do get the tutorial level, which I don’t know if this is a glitch or not, but on my first playthrough, on the official Disney games site, the game just sent me to the level select screen without going to the tutorial, but when I played the game on Family.ca as soon as I started the game it booted me into the tutorial. Either way it wasn’t that much of an issue, it just seemed like an odd coding bug I noticed.

Anyway onto the controls. Super Speedway has really streamlined its controls, obviously the left and right to turn, pressing shift will make you strafe (which is the KEY function of this game), and finally space uses the power ups you pick up while racing. Now based off these controls I can safely assume what you, the reader, would do when you first boot up this game. As the starting counter counts down to GO any racer game veteran will have their finger hovering over the up arrow key because logic dictates that if you push up in a browser based racing game that is usually used to speed up but not in Super Speedway.

You can literally just forget about that because your kart moves forward on its own. That’s right. Your car, whether you want to or not (but really why would you not want to move forward in a race?), will move forward and all you need to do is just press the left and right arrow keys to just turn. But now you might be asking, by what you just said Whyboy
wouldn’t my kart be at a constant speed? Wouldn’t all the drivers’ karts be at a constant speed? How could that possibly become a race with that sort of control scheme?

For one, the A.I. of the other drivers is already pretty ruthless, not difficult to outwit but ruthless enough to continuously ram into you when you’re in their sights. So especially on the later tracks they become a hassle but that’s not really the answer to those questions I just stated is it? No, the real reason why this is a race is the strafe mechanic. The mechanic works like this, when you click and hold the strafe a bar will appear below your character and as you strafe it will first fill up green but once it begins filling red you release the strafe and you get an instant boost. Now picture every other A.I. doing this (excusing all the last place drivers who have the A.I. of rocks and you can picture some pretty intense races.

However, the strafe can be abused to a disgusting extent once you’ve mastered it. Like after I figured out how to strafe after the first race I was literally always one lap ahead of all the other drivers because of it, completely snapping the difficulty curve of the game right in half. I don’t begrudge the game too badly for this because it’s still a rewarding feeling outracing all those stupid A.I. drivers. This is just a necessary negative side to bring up while discussing this mechanic. The rest of the game is pretty standard. There are nine levels in total spanning to three different cups and each level is based on settings from Phineas and Ferb, Fish Hooks and Kick Buttowski. All the levels are well designed, for a browser based racing game, except for a few moments of just plain bland layouts.

Now the main point of this game is to obviously get first in the races but to what end? Well at the start of each race you are given a series of achievements that you can complete. If you complete the achievements then you receive Mickey coins (they aren’t given a name in the game so I just call them Mickey coins) which lets you be able to buy new parts and a paint job for your kart as well as new player skins based off of Disney’s latest character line-up like Perry the Platypus, Dipper from Gravity Falls, even Crash from Crash and Bernstein can be a playable character if you pay the Mickey coins equivalent of an arm. And from a completely aesthetic standpoint, the 2D designs of each of these characters don’t transfer too well to 3D. Brutally honest, some of them look just heinously ugly.

Even though I’ve stated that you are able to buy new parts for your kart there really isn’t any customization. Picture this upgrade system as just a more obtuse checklist, with each part bought they will make your strafe, speed and other attributes much more effective on your kart but each part also makes some of the attributes worst to compensate. So upgrading the kart becomes more of a game of which parts do the game designers want me to buy first, rather then the true freedom of full customization.

The last thing to talk about is the mechanic of weapons. Like in most more cartoony or Mario Kart-esque while you ride along the track you get a chance to pick up one of the three weapons; rockets, shields, mines and some form of juice. From just those names I don’t think I have to explain what each does, but what I do find to be quite a cool game mechanic is that you can mix and match weapons. Rocket and mines creates an exploding shield, rocket and juice creates a super fast rocket that you ride on, and there are loads more combinations. This and strafing really gives the game a much more hectic feel to each race making each a fight to stay in first when you aren’t one lap ahead of everyone.

You can also buy weapons during the middle of the race without having to touch one of the boxes. Now in a game where you can already drive circles around your opponents what is the point of adding this feature other then making an already easy game just a skip through the tulips. For that reason I never used it and had a much more fun time.

To wrap everything up, Disney Super Speedway is a cute little racing game. A racing game that in my opinion escapes that chasm of comparison with Mario Kart thanks to its more unique game mechanics. If you ever get the chance try it out and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised like I was.