Originally posted August 4th 2014 on the Seafoam Gaming Forums

Title: Super Toy Cars

System: Wii U eShop

Price: 7.99

Release date: 7/24/2014

The main game/story

What story? This is a simple racing game that takes inspiration from the idea of playing with Toy Cars, similar to Micro Machines. It may seem weird being released after Mario Kart 8… And it is, but it’s still decent.

Graphics

The menus are easy to navigate for the most part, and the game itself looks clean. The background objects and obstacles look nice, as well as the different cars you can choose from. Unfortunately the track editor feature has a TERRIBLE interface that takes a long time to get used to, a lot of things being unorganized and just not fun to look at or even use. It would be perfect for the gamepad yet it’s used in a rather limited fashion in the track editor.

Music and sound effects:

The music happens to be licensed tracks. As mentioned in my fit music review me growing up with Japanese music rather makes me biased towards most licensed tracks like these. These tracks luckily work for the most part, however and the sound effects sound OK, though the car’s engine can sound rather high pitched if you get stuck against an obstacle.

Gameplay

Being a racing game, it’s obvious how it’s handled. Accelerate forward (Using the ZR button), and backwards (Using the ZL button), use both buttons or the A button to drift, and there you go! The cars handle slightly differently for the most part, so it’s nice and easy to find one that works for you. It seems so hard to mess up, and while Eclipse games did a decent job, there are still a few minor problems with the overall gameplay. First off, if you bump into ANYTHING, you instantly respawn a little ways back. It’s so irritating to be going so far forward only to slightly nudge another car and suddenly get jerked back a bit. It’s like Life Force but in a car.

Second, there is no Off-TV play. For a game like this it would have been nice instead of the gamepad doing pretty much nothing, even in the track editor mode. Luckily the devs are considering it via a patch.

There is also no Online Multiplayer in the Wii U version. While it doesn’t seem necessary, the steam version of this game indeed supports online multiplayer. (Though it costs $10 as a result). The lower price is kinda OK in exchange, but it just doesn’t feel right,  (Though unlike devs such as WB games, this development team at least mentioned why they left it out and told people about it ahead of time.) They are planning to thankfully add leaderboards for time trials and etc soon however, which in my opinion is just as good. There is indeed local MP, and after playing with a good friend of mine we had an OK time, though that leads to the next issue we had. Falling through the floor often in custom tracks seemed to be frequent, along with frequent crashes. (No, not the respawn issue, an actually freeze). This unfortunately hurts the game A LOT in it’s current form, even with the high replay value from Achievements.

Conclusion

While this game has a great concept, and controls good for the most part, technical glitches and ridiculous issues such as the Track Editor really hurt the game in it’s current form. At the moment, I really don’t recommend it, especially due to the crashes and slightly high price tag (You can get Mega Man X2 for the same price). But after a while, patches will hopefully make this car a little more stable. So in regards to the current, initial version, I give Super Toy Cars a 5 out of 10, recommended only for people who won’t mind this game despite all of the initial flaws.

Thanks to Eclipse Games for the review code.