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All Star Fruit Racing is a good looking racer that forgets the basics of driving

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• All-Star Fruit Racing
• Developer- 3D Clouds
  
• Publisher- PQube Limited
  
• PC, PS4, Switch
  

I’m a sucker for a good racing game. Hell, I’ll hang around for longer than I’ll admit for an OK arcade racer. So when All-Star Fruit Racing showed up looking like it had stolen SEGA All-Stars Racing’s drifting I jumped on it. Seriously, the drifting in those games is incredible.

All-Star Fruit Racing’s drifting, as it turns out, is not incredible. It’s not even good. In fact the driving in general is underwhelming and by trying to build on this middling foundation All-Star Fruit Racing ends up with an inconsistent and mundane racer.

From the go, All-Star Fruit racing feels off. There’s all the elements you expect, drifts, boosts, and special weapons. The tracks, weapons, characters and modes are all varied and well presented.It shows well enough in video and screenshots. But once you begin playing everything is slightly off. Racing is inert–there’s little sense of speed and feedback is weak. Drifts slide into lazy curves that fail to deliver the tense arcs of great arcade racers. Boosts feel like gentle nudges forward rather than whiplash inducing acceleration. It’s like you’re racing bumper cars rather than high speed karts.

In place of good driving, All-Star Fruit racing instead tries to add complexity to its weapon system. Fruit is scattered across the tracks, and collecting enough of each of the four types you can turn them into a variety of weapons. These four types map to face buttons of the controller, and by combining different types of fruit juice you can create different weapons. One combination might give you a wind style boost, another combination might create a shield. These weapons all fall into standard genre archetypes, no big surprises there. Combine every fruit type and you’ll get access to your character specific special move. These range in usefulness, with some effective, and some too specific to ever be useful.

This weapon system doesn’t add much. Most of the time it only acts as a distraction. It never felt useful to create a specific weapon, especially since as a whole they don’t feel effective. Feedback is weak to the point where sometimes I was even unsure if my weapons really did hit an opponent. You might as well be throwing paper balls at each other. The complexity of the weapon system actually clouds some of the simplicity of the kart racing genre, which generally is one of its strengths. Seems the developers themselves might even realize this, since during certain races the fruit system is replaced with the more traditional random item boxes.

Removed of that, there’s little to differentiate All-Star Fruit Racing from other kart racers, aside from its fruit theme. And while there’s some decent rendering of fruit on display, its not even consistent in that theming. Tracks rely on more stereotypical locales as the basis of their locations, and weapons often eschew the fruit theme entirely. The aesthetic as a whole is meandering.

If there’s anything remarkable about All-Star Fruit Racing, it’s how deeply average it manages to be.