The Karters

When you go to the 10Ants Hill website, you'll find a big sign warning you that this page is "under construction." That's a depressingly appropriate metaphor for their brand new game The Karters, a mostly incomplete project inspired by the great Crash Team Racing. It's a game that is clearly still months (if not a year) away from being ready to go, yet that didn't stop the Polish developer from launching it on Steam with an absurd $20 asking price. That's just the first of a long list of terrible decisions made by 10Ants Hill.

Because this is going to be an overwhelmingly negative review, I want to start out by saying something nice about The Karters. For all the things it gets wrong, the one consistently good thing about this game is the level designs. The six tracks generally look fantastic and even offer multiple paths and shortcuts, which initially gave me hope that maybe there is something to this game. But the further in I got, the more I realized that all hope was lost.

Simply put, this is a boring and painfully generic kart racing game with no depth or reason to exist. It doesn't bring anything new to the table nor give us a reason to pick it over the hundreds of other kart racers on the market. And it's actually worse than that, because at least those other kart racers were fully developed. This is a mess of a game that can't help but remind you that it's incomplete at every turn.

The first sign of trouble is when you're forced to pick between six lame characters with names like Puma, Pablo, Bobby and Sir Ronald. There's no theme or consistency between these racers, with some sporting floating heads and others looking like the kind of animal companions you would find a bad Disney cartoon. They don't drive interesting vehicles or have anything worthwhile to say. In fact, the little dialog they do have is repeated non-stop throughout every single race, all but guaranteeing that you'll hate all of these characters by the time you're done with The Karters.

Another problem is that the races are slow and lack any kind of excitement. I'm not sure if it's because the tracks are too long or because there aren't enough aggressive racers to compete against, but I found every mode and event to be the very definition of boring. It doesn't help that two of the single-player modes strip out the other racers entirely, instead having you compete against the clock and pick up floating letters on the track. It's almost as if the rest of the modes were designed to lower your expectations so that the terrible race events looked good in comparison.

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And then there are the items you pick up while driving, a staple of the kart racing genre. Every time you run over a mystery box the game spins through a half dozen or so different items, but I'm convinced that only two of them are actually in the game. You can either use a turbo boost or drop a bottle of toxic goo, which are pretty standard items for this type of game. If there are more, then I was incredibly unlucky. I raced through every single track and those were the only two items that popped up. I have to assume the rest of the pick-ups will be available when this game is actually completed, sometime down the road.

There are also a handful of technical problems holding The Karters back. One of the weird bugs is how the computer will get confused and not know what place you're in. You'll be way out in front and the computer will think you're in second, or you'll have a situation where there's clearly somebody in front of you and the game thinks you're in first. The Karters also has an issue where you'll be able to drive right through backgrounds and objects, almost as if they weren't there. Granted, that ended up working to my advantage more than naught, but it's clear this game still has some kinks to work out.

From the lame characters to the boring racing to the technical issues, The Karters is still has a long way to go before it's finished. It's the kind of racing game that should have been shuttled to Steam Early Access until it was ready to go, because the full $20 game that is currently available is absolutely not worth buying. There's not even a proper options menu at this point. When it comes right down to it, The Karters never makes a compelling case why you should buy it over the countless other kart racers.