Review for All-Star Fruit Racing. Game for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 13/07/2018
Summer is certainly one of the most popular seasons, both for the sun and the sea and for the free time to devote to our passion: video games. Summer is also the perfect season to launch a fruit-themed arcade racing game on the market, which just looking at it makes us want fresh cocktails. All-Star Fruit Racing bases everything on fruit by proposing a world similar to that of Vanellope in Wreck-It Ralph, which in that case was based on sweets, but it is still very easy to notice a slight resemblance.
There are many titles that have tried to imitate the award-winning Mario Kart, and very few have managed to bring a valid and fun product to gamers' homes. 3DClouds, an Italian software house, has set itself the goal of creating a racing game with innovative mechanics, without however being free from more or less serious defects.
Ready, steady… fruit!
Publishing a game that has to deal directly with a giant like Mario Kart is certainly not easy, which is why the Italian team has decided to focus more on innovative mechanics rather than on something already seen and difficult to improve. All-Star Fruit Racing has a base identical to any other racing game, with the three classic modes: career, exhibition and multiplayer. The single player career mode catapults us into twelve championships with their respective races to face, where it will also be possible to choose our driver with your own car.
The style of the game, as you can easily guess, is completely based on fruit both from the point of view of tracks, karts and characters, and from that of the power ups, characterized by new mechanic called Juicer. This mechanism works like a tank that will tend to fill up every time you pick fruit, mixing the various fruits collected and producing attack, defense or boost power ups. You can obviously activate / deactivate the various tanks to mix the fruits at will according to your style of play, opting for one type of combo rather than another. If you decide to leave all the tanks activated, when you fill them you can use your special ability, different based on the character you have chosen.
Little variety?
In any self-respecting racing title, one of the fundamental aspects is certainly the level design of the circuits, well done in All-Star Fruit Racing, were it not for a basic monotony that appears already after facing the first races. In general the circuits are all very flat and not based on the three levels to which Mario Kart had accustomed us, and as if that were not enough the shortcuts present are very few, even if well integrated with the tracks.
Even from the point of view of the characters we have not found anything memorable: yes, there are 22 characters, but they are all very anonymous and sometimes even graphically ugly. Leaving aside the artistic aspect, each character as already mentioned will have a special ability available, while we found no particular differences in the karts, which all have more or less the same handling, speed and drift ability.
Drifting is a very well-known mechanic in racing games, which is the reason that led 3dclouds.it to introduce it in their game in a version not too different from what we already know. In All-Star Fruit Racing drifting will allow you to tackle entire curves at speed with the possibility of obtaining a boost, unless you use this function too much: in fact, drifting too long you risk overheating the tires and as a consequence you will lose important seconds for the race.
We could have done better
If from the point of view of the gameplay we have found mechanics at times interesting and well implemented, from the graphic point of view we can be considered only partially satisfied. If the PC version, already released in early access for some time, allows you to play with one decent resolution and definitely well-defined textures, we cannot say the same for the console counterpart, where the worst port is certainly the one for the Nintendo Switch. In the portable version we encountered a Too heavy aliasing, forgettable character textures, and a poorly defined overall look, while in the dock version the problem of characters that are darker and not at all graceful is accentuated.
Excellent work on the fluidity front: the game can easily handle any situation and is always snappy. We cannot say the same about the responsiveness of the controls, which more than once seemed to us to be slightly delayed, although never too seriously. Even the AI, as good as it may be, seemed too difficult to deal with: in fact, from the very first races there is a certainty difficulty in recovering positions, a fact that forces you to repeat the races after learning every secret of the circuit.
Last (but not least) multiplayer, which in All-Star Fruit Racing is available both locally and online. You can play locally with four friends, or online for up to eight players. We have not encountered particular problems in this mode, if not some disconnection from online games, which for now seemed not very stable but at the same time very fun.
All-Star Fruit Racing is a courageous product developed by an Italian team who wanted to demonstrate their talent in the field of video games. The new mechanics of the tanks, the special moves of the characters and the well-made circuits make the game fun to play, especially in the summer given the theme based on fruit. Too bad for the characterization of the characters and for a level design that is too monotonous, as well as for an approximate conversion in the console versions that contribute to losing some points to our local production, which still remains innovative compared to the competition.
► All-Star Fruit Racing is a Sport-type game developed and published by 3DClouds.it for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 13/07/2018
