This runs at close to the single-player’s 30fps frame rate, and maintains a significantly high level of detail. Pretty cool.Ī full-featured split screen mode for up to four players on one Switch is present and correct, and one of the biggest reasons to buy the game. This mode has gold, silver and bronze times to beat for each track, and each with ghosts to race too, along with your personal best, and the three tiers for medals. There is no online multiplayer, but there are online leaderboards for Time Challenge mode. It’s also got a startline boost gauge to let you see exactly where the engine revs are in order to get the best start. For instance, the occasions where the track cambers to nearly 90 degrees is arguably more exciting than Nintendo’s opus because the kart follows the camber, rather than the camera always following behind the kart, making the angle look enjoyably perilous, rather than the world revolving around you. The game even trumps Mario Kart 8 in a couple of areas. The music does at least speed up for the last lap, and there’s some fun banjo in there for the more agricultural levels. The sound could be better – perhaps there aren’t enough environmental sound effects, but it does feel a little subdued. The characters are well animated, and the environments lush and colourful. ![]() The game engine is very strong, with lovely solid environments, decent special effects, and all running at a solid 30fps in docked mode and handheld, though you can see the slight hit in resolution on the latter. Tossing exploding presents into the hands of other players is a particular high point, as are Clockwork Smurf’s ‘helicopter arms’. ![]() Each character has their own trademark attack, however, and it is fun to try them all out. But if you don’t care about Smurfs, it won’t make much difference. Smurfette is pretty nifty at cornering compared to Papa Smurf, for example, though the characters only make noises in character rather than saying actual lines of dialogue, presumably to make the game understandable in whichever region or language you play in. There’s a decent roster of Smurfs (Clockwork Smurf is so endearing), and the handling varies between cars. The AI poses a reasonable challenge but, even so, if you’re familiar with how these things work, single-player can be cleared in an hour or two. There are also only two tiers of difficulty: ‘fun’ and ‘hyperspeed’. ![]() There are only three cups of four races, totalling 12 circuits, and then there’s a mirror option too. There is, however, noticeably less content even than vanilla MK8. You can powerslide to build up different levels of boost charges, you can hold two items at once, collect up to 10 Smurfberries to increase your speed, there are shortcuts, a familiar weapon set complete with race position context distribution… it’s even got the exact same driver aids for less-experienced players, namely turning assist, tilt steering control and automatic acceleration. But for the Smurfs to even make it into the same ballpark as Nintendo’s behemoth series is a quite remarkable achievement. And of course, that’s absolutely a good thing because Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is still hands-down the best kart racer around, even though it first appeared on Wii U in 2014.
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