Emoji Kart Racer

I like to be surprised. I’m a big fan of stories with surprise endings and I like it when something that should be bad is surprisingly good. So, with that spirit in mind, I went into 2023 wanting to avoid the usual negativity and cynicism, and choose instead to be optimistic about whatever came my way. Little did I know that this New Years resolution would be put to the ultimate test right out of the gate with Emoji Kart Racer, a game that is just begging to be dunked on. Is this new family-friendly racing game surprisingly great, or did I revert back to my old cynical ways with the very first new game I played this year? Find out now when I review Emoji Kart Racer.

Let’s be honest, you already know what Emoji Kart Racer is. The title tells you everything. It’s a racing game in the style of Mario Kart, only instead of beloved Nintendo characters, we get a bunch of round, yellow-skinned Emojis. There’s no story or world building here, it’s just a simple kart racer with the kinds of smiley, frowny, winky and silly faces that you see in text messages and on social media. It is exactly what you think it is.

Obviously, there’s nothing original or unique about this approach. Over the last thirty years, we’ve seen pretty much every type of licensed property turned into a simple, shallow kart racer, with very few of them adding anything new or interesting. That said, I can certainly think of ways you can use the emoji characters and icons to create something compelling, even if the game never breaks free of being a basic Mario Kart clone. The problem is that Emoji Kart Racer never makes the effort, and instead leaves us with a product so generic that I can’t imagine anybody being happy or satisfied with the end result, not even young kids.

Seeing as this review is about to turn incredibly negative, let’s first take a moment to talk about some of the things that I actually liked about Emoji Kart Racer. For starters, this game comes with 12 diverse stages, all of which look good and are filled with different kinds of obstacles. I also enjoyed the music, which is mostly well done and does a good job of complementing each race track. And finally, I appreciate that the game offers four-player splitscreen action, a mode you don’t see enough in racing games.

Unfortunately, this game gets pretty much everything else wrong. Let’s start with the gameplay, which is the very definition of stiff and sluggish. The karts barely turn and they accelerate about as fast as a slug. It also doesn’t help that the races are so slow and so boring that you can’t help but sit there thinking about how unwieldy the control is. There’s never a moment where you’ll actually enjoy playing the game.

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On its own the stiff gameplay would be bad enough, but the level designs only help to exacerbate the problem. The twelve courses are narrow, with the sides of the track acting like an invisible wall. This makes a simple thing like taking a big jump a real risk, which should be the last thing on your mind when fighting for first place. What’s more, if you hit the side of the track or smack into that invisible wall, the kart is almost guaranteed to flip on its side. And that’s not even the worst of it, because you’ll occasionally hit a traffic cone or some other small object and then get flung into the air for no reason. That’s annoying. But what makes it even worse is that it takes forever to get back up to speed, effectively tanking your chances of coming in first.

And then there are the weapons you pick up throughout the race. These items are so generic that I guarantee you would be able to guess almost all of them on your first attempt. You get bombs, missiles, a lightning bolt that speeds you up and a pile of poop that you can drop behind the kart. With the possible exception of the poop, you’ve seen all this before in pretty much every kart racing game released in the last thirty years. With so many different emojis to choose from, it’s a shame that the developers didn’t come up with more original weapons. They simply copied and pasted what other games had done before instead of using the property to come up with something unique and different.

And that’s one of the biggest problems I have with Emoji Kart Racer. For as bad as the gameplay is, I’m almost most annoyed that the developer didn’t do anything fun with the emoji brand. This is a kart racing game that has no discernable personality. Hell, you don’t even see the faces of your racer or the rest of the cast, since you’re always seeing the backs of their yellow heads. This makes it feel like you’re not really racing against different characters, but rather the same character in different karts. And even the karts are just cosmetic, since they don’t change the handling or have different specs.

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And that’s only the first symptom of a much bigger problem. When I say that this game has no personality, I mean that the game is so generic that you could plop in any licensed property and you wouldn’t have to change a damn thing. A great example of this short-coming is in the levels, which may look good, but have absolutely nothing to do with the emoji theme. You’re not racing through stages based on comment sections, twitter or even internet memes, but rather through generic kart racing stages that could be party of any game. How cool would it be to race through a house fire based on that drawing with the “this is fine” dog? Or maybe you race through a stage that pokes fun at all of the Facebook cliches? Sadly, there’s nothing like that in this game. Instead, our yellow-faced characters race through a level inspired by Jurassic Park, something that has nothing to do with emojis. It makes no sense.

This is ultimately why Emoji Kart Racer fails. This isn’t a game built around emojis, but rather a game that just so happens to have emojis in it. The developer has failed to take advantage of the theme, instead opting to just churn out another cookie cutter kart racer. Couple that with the painfully bad gameplay and the complete lack of extra modes, and you have yourself a racing game that fails to make a strong case for why it should even exist. It’s hard to imagine a more generic kart racer.

On one final note, I found that the PlayStation 5’s rumble was so obnoxiously aggressive, that it often felt like the controller was trying to break free of my hands and escape. And after playing through Emoji Kart Racer, I can understand why.