1/5 ★ – hwljulie's review of Cartoon Network Racing.

Playing this game right after eating waffle house is not the move If you’re prone to motion sickness like me, this game will make you sick by the second race. If you hit anything in the slightest, the whole camera abruptly whips to a whole new direction because your kart is now somehow perpendicular or opposite of the direction you were going. Now the cherry on top is reversing and moving the camera around to readjust your kart back to the correct direction, which exacerbates the motion sickness even more. The physics and steering of the game are pretty abysmal, so recorrecting yourself or just making tricky turns in the game isn’t so easy and fun either. Now for things that actually matter: the items aren’t balanced. Most of the time, you’re getting items that don’t help you since items do not depend on what place you’re in. The giant spike ball you get that only launches backwards is what you’ll get when you’re in last place. Same with the barrel of oil you pour behind you to cause others to slip. In first place, all the items will be useful but the rubber banding in this game is so intense and broken that no matter how well you drive, the enemy AI is gonna pass you anyway and they will stay there for a long time unless you get a rocket to shoot them with. But before that can happen, everyone else behind you is also gonna rubber band ahead of you and hit you with a billion items. Game also has a mario kart double dash mechanic where two characters are driving at once and whoever sits in the back can use their special ability when the meter is filled up. These special abilities usually made no difference to the race whatsoever, especially because of said rubber banding problem, so I think they just added this feature for more content fluff. Track design is bad. They’re all simply themed to the cartoons and then the job is done, but by no means are they meant to be designed for a proper racing game. In every track, there’s a plethora of arrow signs on the walls or track indicating where to go because the design is so bad you can’t full figure out where to go on your own. Now to speak with some gushy bias, I heavily grew up with cartoon network as a kid and every cartoon in this game made me incredibly nostalgic. I miss when cartoons were more zany, had non-celebrity voice actors that had real talent, had animations that were more expressive, had decorative quirky font of the show’s logos, and had the charm of “cartoon violence.” The absolute coolest thing about this game is that when you casually play the game and complete tournaments, you get to unlock full episodes of the featured shows in the game! I had a lot of fun unlocking these episodes and watching courage the cowardly dog and cow and chicken in the game. One shoutout to one charming quirk in the game: when you’re deciding which garage to select (basically which cartoon do you want to play as) it plays the theme song of the cartoon of the garage you’re in front in. This gave me a little smile so I felt like I had to acknowledge this :) This game is bad and obviously it’s just a brand marketing game so one shouldn’t expect too much of it. But if you want to go down a road of nostalgia and you’re not too sensitive to motion sickness, I recommend playing this game for at least 30 min to get that sense of childhood whimsies.