Joy Ride Turbo (Xbox 360)

Like many games developed to make use of the Kinect motion sensor, Kinect Joy Ride was soon looking for a way to broaden its audience by including more typical controller inputs. However, rather than retooling their original game to offer two different control methods, the developers decided to develop a sequel instead, and so, Joy Ride Turbo was born, carrying over some of the tracks and elements from the original racing game while still adding in some new content to make it more than just a rerelease.

 

Joy Ride Turbo is a racing game that, despite featuring some rather realistic vehicle designs, is actually more of a kart racer than a racing sim. A typical race will feature many of the aspects of track design that make a driving game interesting, with plenty of turns and alternate paths to take to try and get in front of your competition. Controlling the cars feels natural, with the player able to drift if they so choose but having a pretty decent basic level of control over their motion and speed. From here though, things get a bit more interesting, as cars can fill up a boost meter through stylish maneuvers during a race. Pulling off long drifts is one way to earn the boost energy, but there are often jumps on the course where you can take advantage of the air time to flip or spin your vehicle, the more maneuvers you pull of during your hang time turning into more boost power. Once you’ve gathered enough energy, you can start taking advantage of these bursts of speed to overtake the other cars, much of a race devoted to not only finding the best path through a course but also building up boost at every opportunity and using it so you can refill it quickly.

Items also join the fray in Joy Ride Turbo, players getting a random item to help them out when they hit mystery boxes that appear in the road. The use of each item is pretty easy to glean from the icons that represent them and easy to remember for the few that do require use to learn, things like rockets obviously being used as a projectile you fire at other racers to mess them up and the full boost power up distinct enough to tell apart from the other items once you’ve used it once. Players can expect to get powerups like decoy item boxes, shields to protect themselves from others, and speed boosts, with racers in the lower places having opportunities to get even better items like one that will freeze all the other racers briefly. However, no item is so powerful it will drastically change the course of the race, even the freeze allowing racers to move forward while encased in ice but lose their ability to turn until they break the ice with a boost or by hitting something. They add some more variety to the play and can close small skill gaps between players, but knowing the tracks and driving well will still lead to victory most of the time. The items are perhaps not all too exciting though because of this design choice though, but the boost meter does have a greater impact on play due to its constant prominence.

 

While the items, boost, and driving all feel up to par, the course design does leave a little to be desired. Joy Ride Turbo does offer plenty of splitting paths to encourage racers to take risks on trying to take the harder to access shortcuts, and there are some cases where you’ll drive on interesting roads like the side of a dam or riding up the sloped sides of canyons, but most of the tracks do feel a little condensed. A typical lap in many areas doesn’t really encounter much gimmickry or exciting driving challenges, the player often able to stick to the road with a pretty good guarantee of hitting boosters on the track and item boxes along the way. Shortcuts don’t always offer the edge that makes going for them worth it, so even levels that have more interesting visual variety like the lighthouse course or the one with the large dragon start to feel a bit dry due to straightforward driving demands. Jumps sometimes try to make up for it by being long rather than challenging, and the jumps in some levels actually eat up too much of the time so the driving isn’t give the room it needs to be a constant source of competition. The gimmickier stages actually face this problem a lot, where perhaps the most clearly different design found is in a canyon that you cross with large cannons… but short track length and the time spent in the canyons means not much time is given for trying to overtake the competition. Funnily enough, perhaps the other track with a pronounced notable gimmick is one styled like a go-kart track, its gimmick being that it has no item boxes or ramps for boosting, the focus on driving skill giving it a stronger identity than most levels. A lack of clear segments on many tracks makes most of the them lose their luster after racing through them a few times.

While Joy Ride Turbo does offer multiplayer racing options to compete with friends locally or online, the single-player takes the form of a few tournaments, the player needing to complete different cups that are made up a few races each. The cups are divided first based on the horsepower of the engines you’ll be using, these being pretty much difficulty levels since slower races come with less skilled AI racer opponents. From there, the cups are then divided by the type of car you’ll be using. While you’ll always be racing as your Microsoft Avatar, the cars you drive come in a few different forms, these being Muscle Cars, Sports Cars, and Trucks. While they all control pretty similarly, they do have a few differences like the amount of boosts they can hold onto at one time. Each set of races will feature a cup focused on each type of car that must be finished to unlock one where all the cars can race together, but getting first place in them isn’t totally necessary so long as you place high enough based on the points you accumulate in each race. Much like the tracks though, some of these cups feel over too quickly, it being fairly easy to complete the single player content without being wholly satisfied by the content on offer, the cups trying to present the tracks in different orders but not able to overcome their plain design through rearrangement.

 

There is one other mode for players to mess around in though, that being the two Stunt Parks. Stunt Parks don’t focus on competitive racing, players instead set out to drive around a large area designed to be explored. Here, players can try and drive across dangerous tracks, gain incredible amounts of air, or pull off excellent movement to reach hidden areas all in the pursuit of different collectibles. The main focus of the mode are the trophies scattered about that are only available if you can pull off the stunts required to reach them, but the mode also has vehicle parts hidden all around its action hubs. The way you unlock new rides in Joy Ride Turbo is through collecting these hidden crates either in the Stunt Parks or during normal races, and while the Stunt Parks are bit a more lenient with them, you’ll often have to go off the beaten path to find them in regular races. The odd thing about them though is that the parts you find don’t total up to a new car too easily, vehicles comprised of three parts that can be hidden all across the different tracks and parks so it ends up being quite hard to guarantee you’ll unlock the vehicles you’re interested in. While there are some interesting designs on offer like dune buggies, vans, and sleeker sports cars, the odd thing about these vehicles is that despite being difficult to unlock, they aren’t really much better than the defaults. Some have a clear edge over others, but most of them have their stats distributed where something like an increase in speed comes with worse control as the price for such an edge. It makes the unlocking process a little unrewarding despite this being a pretty smart way of ensuring multiplayer won’t be dominated by players who put in the time to get these vehicles. The drawback of this though is that single-player can be pretty easily completed with default vehicles, there being little reason to pursue the extra content since it doesn’t really give you any strong edge towards completing its challenges.

THE VERDICT: The mechanics of Joy Ride Turbo are where it works the best, the driving as responsive as you’d hope and the extra features making the races a bit more interesting. Easy to understand items that aren’t too disruptive allow better racers to win but still give inexperienced players the potential for a comeback while the boost system is a more present mechanic with a more active role in success that helps keep races constantly competitive. However, it’s pretty easy to speed through the entire game, many of the tracks feeling short and generic with even the explorative Stunt Parks exhausting much of their content a bit too quickly. Unlocking vehicles seems to be the only task that requires constant exploration and activity, but the rewards for doing so aren’t meaningful enough to justify the quest, meaning that Joy Ride Turbo is left as an acceptable kart racer without the bells and whistles that could have made it truly exciting.

 

And so, I give Joy Ride Turbo for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. While not a joyless experience, it is one that feels a bit underdeveloped. Having only two stunt parks feels like a sign that the developers weren’t too interested in exploring their ideas, instead putting them out there and hoping they’d pass muster on the merits of their basic but acceptable design. Everything works in Joy Ride Turbo, the driving is up the task and the items do their job of adding bursts of variety to the race well, but there’s not much here that excels. The track design is too reserved to stand out most of the time and the vehicles don’t drastically change their feel even between disparate builds like bulky vans and sleek sports cars. A bit more danger, a bit more variation, and more meaningful goals to pursue than collecting vehicle parts could give Joy Ride Turbo what it needs to be exhilarating and a game worth returning to, but it does at least work pretty well as racing game junk food. It won’t fill you up, but its still got enough in its small package to give you an accessible pick up and play racing title

 

Perhaps Joy Ride Turbo just has a case of strong indecision holding it back. It’s born from changing from one control method to another, but now it feels a little trapped between its realistic elements and its wackier kart racing side. Leaning more strongly one way or another could have benefited it, but it does contain enough fair racing and unusual track design that it will at least keep players looking for either style of play pleased, it just won’t hook them by featuring either angle enough to leave a strong impression.