Soooo…Garfield Kart: Furious Racing. I had really low expectations for this one, folks. Like, really low. Mass Effect Andromeda or Fallout 76 low. Like I was expecting a broken mess of a bad looking game. And…I actually liked it?

Yeah! It’s actually not bad. It’s a Mario Kart clone without a doubt, but the game’s playable, doesn’t have a ton of bugs in it, and it’s kinda fun.

Okay, so Garfield Kart: Furious Racing, which I’m just calling Garfield Kart for short now, is your basic kart racing game featuring Garfield & Friends. But not really, like the Garfield & Friends cartoon from the 80’s. Noooo, this is the new Garfield. The 3D Garfield. The one I will not watch out of principle and respect for the 80’s show. I’m sure anybody who’s heard me talk about the 80’s will be surprised to hear that. Anyway, there’s no story, it’s basically just an excuse to mess around in a racing game with a bunch of Garfield characters. The cast isn’t huge but you’ve got all the major characters. Garfield, Odie, Jon the loser (oh don’t be like that, we all know he is one, we all know a Jon and he’s lovable but he’s that guy that thinks socks with sandals are fashionable), his girlfriend Liz whose self respect is actually low enough that she’s dating Jon, Garfield’s…whatever the cat version of a girlfriend is, Nermal, some mouse, and also some jerkoff cat that I’ve never seen before that I’m sure they added to the new show and game him some quirky yet lovable quality to make him one of the gang. Missing from the group is the B Tier Garfield characters like Orson the pig, that jerk rooster and all the other farm animals.

So the graphics are simple but they get the job done. Don’t go in expecting Skyrim and you’ll be fine. The music is your typical generic cartoon music. It sounded like they had a different song for every level, so props for that. The characters don’t actually say anything. They just kinda hoot at everything. It’s weird. Like they couldn’t pay someone $100 to say “mmmm lasagna”, “I hate mondays” into a microphone? I’d have done it.

You’ve got all the Mario Kart staples here, replaced with more, uh, Garfield-y items. Instead of turtle shells, you get pies. Instead of the lightning bolt, a pillow puts everybody to sleep. The blue shell is replaced by UFOs and the list goes on.

The gameplay itself is actually pretty solid. There were only a couple weird bugs that I encountered when playing but nothing game breaking and it really didn’t hurt my enjoyment of it all that much. You’ve got all the Mario Kart staples here, replaced with more, uh, Garfield-y items. Instead of turtle shells, you get pies. Instead of the lightning bold, a pillow puts everybody to sleep. The blue shell is replaced by UFOs and the list goes on. There’s one item that is sure to be rage inducing, is the magic wand. You basically hit a target with it up ahead of you and you switch places with them. I would really enjoy doing that to one of my friends to watch their reaction.

The tracks are fine, you have all the different types of tracks here: the neighborhood, the farm, the haunted castle, the egyptian tomb, and so on. Again, they’re kinda simple but I’m pretty sure that’s what they were going for here. There’s shortcuts in each track so if you learn them then in theory you could fly past competition, though some of them are only accessible by a spring item you randomly pickup from the item boxes. And you’ll want to be deliberate with those to pick up the puzzle pieces scattered in each track in order to open up pictures in the gallery. I guess.

Speaking of extras, beating tracks unlocks hats for the characters to wear that provide various bonuses. Beat the track on the harder difficulties and you’ll unlock more powerful versions of those hats. Getting 1st in every race in Grand Prix mode also unlocks spoilers for the karts that’ll also have special stat bonuses. So there’s actually a fair amount to get in thise and seeing all the characters with weird hats on while racing is kinda funny.

Unlocking those more powerful hats will get tough after awhile though. The difficulty spike from the 50cc races to the 100cc and 150cc can get steep. I’ll say that the computer on 50cc is pretty stupid and someone could stab you in the top of the head with an icepick and you could probably still win. You’ll spend most of those races in 1st place. It’s basically the mode for little kids to play and have fun.

So after you’re feeling confident that the moron AI is awful and you want to jump to 100cc and 150cc, the computer goes from that ludicrous display to suddenly remembering that it spent its existense playing nothing but Forza, Gran Turismo, and Project Cars and then you realize that if you’re not racing your best or you’re not Jeremy Clarkson, it will bend you over and spank you. And it also develops this uncanny ability to use the sleepy pillow and pie attacks just as you’re clearing a jump, so that when it hits you, you’ll lose all your momentum and fall to your demise below, being stuck in last place for the rest of your now humiliating race.

So some unbalanced difficulty changes and a couple weird but small bugs aside, I actually had fun playing this. It’s clearly meant to be played with friends but game is functional, there’s variety to the tracks and granted not a ton of characters but the hats and spoilers add variety to them, and if you have kids then they’ll have fun with it if they’re bored of Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing. I will say though that after playing this, I will not judge a game by its cover just because it’s from a cartoon again because this was a pleasant surprise.