The Shrekoning: Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway (GBA)

In TDK’s continued efforts to wring as many games as possible from the Shrek brand, it was practically inevitable the big green guy would find himself behind the wheel of a go-kart. Ever since Super Mario Kart popularized a way for racing games to reach more casual players, many mascots and cartoon characters have found themselves driving little vehicles and pelting each other with items, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway was hoping to get a slice of that pie. However, even within the party racer genre there are many fundamental elements to a racing game that are important to get right. A game can’t be carried by characters and items alone, but it almost seems like that was the idea in this Game Boy Advance game.

Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway first belts out a rather cacophonous main menu theme once it boots up, the odd barking vocals thankfully the worst the game gets in regards to its soundtrack. In the bottom left of the menu is a version of Shrek with a frankly eerie smile on his face and he doesn’t look much better during the actual races, although at least since you’ll mostly be viewing racers from behind the whole time so you don’t get to see their often poorly drawn faces on giant heads. Another unusual touch during the menu navigation is the sound for backing out of a menu is similar to the end of Godzilla’s roar, but these are all things that are only on screen briefly despite their memorable strangeness. Actual races will have more generic music, but there is an odd touch where every character has a dedicated noise for smashing into another racer and it’s not actually meant to be them saying it. Sometimes it’s a voice, other times it is a collision sound effect, but considering the voices don’t really sound like imitations of any of the playable characters it must just be an odd poorly thought out way of differentiating the cast.

Visually the 16 race tracks do have different settings like swamps, a castle, and farmlands, and even a few levels get more inventive like the ice level being a candy themed Christmas level fit for the Gingerbread Man character and you can even find yourself racing on a giant log structure near a treetop village. These settings don’t often impact the actual course layout save for that ice level being liberal in placing slippery patches compared to the usual more restrained mud puddles dotting most courses, but there are a few odd things about a course’s appearance to keep in mind. First is that the universally flat tracks won’t display the upcoming road too well, meaning that you need to watch out for some discoloration early since you won’t be able to tell if it is truly a hole in the course until you reach it. These openings in bridges and other areas will cause you to be dragged back to an earlier part of the track if you drop into them usually, although oddly enough sometimes they drop you far ahead instead, but the risk is still there for you but oddly enough not the computer players. It’s not uncommon to spot them driving right over a patch of water unimpeded, but since the AI in the game is almost universally fairly bad even on the highest difficulty they probably need that edge to be more competitive. Luckily you do have your own trick up your sleeve since they’ll always try to stay on track even though offroading doesn’t seem to have much of an appreciable effect on your speed, so if you want to cut corners or avoid dangers you have a fair bit of freedom there.

To still try and corral you somewhat though the game does place impenetrable walls to better mark the borders of the course and ensure you take turns more often then you make your own shortcuts. Walls are probably the most dangerous thing in the game funnily enough, as impacting with them, even in the form of a side sweep, will immediately bring you to a stop and most likely briefly entangle you as well. If you are stuck then your attempts to drive free will be curtailed by your character instead slamming against the wall again and again no matter which direction you try so you must come to a complete stop and reverse to free yourself. Luckily many levels have their walls fairly far out so this shouldn’t be too much of a bother, but the game’s hardest level, Parapet Peril, is difficult precisely because of how enclosed it is. The racing area often barely has the room for two drivers to pass each other and it can practically devolve to single file driving, but the computer controlled racers have an advantage over you that makes trying to take first place in this course grueling. If you collide with another racer you’ll be launched back and lose all speed but the computer players are entirely unaffected, so while Parapet Peril threatened to be the most interesting track because of its focus on careful but competitive driving, that work can be undone by another racer lightly brushing you to rob you of all momentum.

Track design otherwise is often rather harmless if sometimes complicated in odd ways. Many courses have what might be better described as “long cuts” since deviating from the track’s clear path is the way you take these often fruitless diversions. There might be an item pick up in that area but those aren’t so rare that you would want to lose so much ground to grab one that might not even turn out to be particularly useful. Later courses do start to introduce little jumps where you hop over either open air or another part of the course and luckily this part seems fairly reliable. You may need to hit a speed booster to take some of them but the ones that actually make that less than guaranteed are thankfully not the ones where you could land on earlier parts of the track and lose your lead. It does give you a nifty view of other racers to jump over the track in that way, although in many courses it’s not too hard to lap a few of the other racers even on the highest difficulty. Besides Parapet Peril though, the only level that really seems to handle the seven AI racers you’re up against well is Big Bad Autobahn, a more twist-riddled track where it’s easy to accidentally take the not-so-short cuts and since it is one of the four tracks with a character unlock tied to it, that character is present and driving a little better than the rest of the abysmal competition.

Driving for the player can, at first, be a little rough, mostly because a few of the default racers are given rather bad handling to the point they have to cut the engines to take even the game’s often fairly wide turns, but of the eight racers you begin with you are given characters like the Three Little Pigs and Gingerbread Man whose high handling gives you clean enough control that their supposedly worse speed stats are not an issue. There are four unlockable characters, some having decent stats as well but there are odd situations like Shrek’s nemesis Lord Farquaad having similar stats to Monsieur Hood save for the archer’s higher handling, basically meaning the final boss character is also objectively worse than another racer you can unlock sooner. However, if you were hoping to maybe take advantage of these unlocked racers to clear the solo cup tournaments, you’ll find the game has made an odd decision. While the game’s 16 3 lap races can all be played individually and retried with impunity in the single player mode, every character must work their way through the races one by one and their progress is saved per difficulty. For example, if you get to Parapet Peril on Hard with a character but would like to try it on a lower setting or with a better character, you’ll find you need to start from race 1 all over again. This might be a weak attempt to give an illusion of longevity even though there is seemingly no reward for beating every race with every character on every difficulty, but what it amounts to is locking the player into a racer choice unless they want to replay everything in a game that struggles to put up a legitimate fight but can impede you with technical problems.

The items that are meant to spice up the races are almost negligible since you already can quite easily gain the lead with decent driving, but they can at least contribute early on or might help in the rare moment things do go awry. Each character has a dedicated special move they immediately have access to once they’ve grabbed enough of the Shrek-eared letter S pickups scattered around a course, although their usefulness is dubious. If you have a forward firing attack like the Dwarf racer does you probably won’t get much use out of it due to the low difficulty, but some characters do have traps they can lay behind them that can at least mess with other racers if they hit them. There are horseshoes scattered about to pick up as well but since I don’t have the manual and can’t find the information either online or come up with an explanation of their purpose through experimentation, they seem practically pointless.

As for more universal items with clear effects, these come from spell books floating around on the track and interestingly enough some of them are actually curses that can do things like briefly make you fall asleep and unable to control your character or turn you into a pumpkin for a bit who has reversed controls. The curse books are black and it’s easy to run into them since everything in the game is incredibly pixelated at even short distances, but if you are holding an item already you can drive through these books without any issue. The normal items include things like three pumpkins that rotate around you and can be fired forward to mess with other racers if one actually manages to be ahead of you, little red riding hood’s cloak will protect you from other items although you aren’t often under fire, the balloon frog gives you a short speed boost, and the weirdest item of all is the thumbs up that briefly shrinks everyone but the user so that they’re the tiniest bit slower but still able to mess you up if you dare to touch them. This unexciting item selection unsurprisingly adds very little and makes deviating from the course to grab one a fool’s errand most of the time, the occasional racer shrinkage sometimes the only time you really are impacted by items at all during a race.

THE VERDICT: The best you can often hope for out of a race in Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway is a quick and easy lead you won’t struggle to maintain because any moment there is difficulty it’s often for an aggravating reason. Be it because you picked a poor racer in a game that values handling over all else, you hit a barrier wall and lost time trying to struggle free from it, or bumped a computer driver that was unaffected as you were the only one to lose all momentum, it always seems to be some technical problem or bad design choice that can actually lead to issues winning against the otherwise incompetent AI. The items that are meant to add some spice to the racing are simplistic and rarely impactful and course designs don’t usually ask much of you even to the point offroading doesn’t seem to slow you down much, although the hazards they do actually sprinkle on the road can be hard to see coming due to objects being so heavily pixelated as you approach. It’s surprising the game is so easy when its systems are so flawed, but it just means winning a race feels empty since there was barely anything legitimate that could have prevented that outcome.

And so, I give Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway for Game Boy Advance…

An ATROCIOUS rating. It may not sound this way but I was actually trying to avoid heaping negativity on this title, but the more I searched for something to not dismiss as outright awful the more I kept stumbling into issue after issue. Forgettable race track music and decent backgrounds are about all it really gets right since the few challenging race courses are made challenging either because of their confusing layouts or the fact they lean so heavily on the game’s awful handling of impacts with other racers or barriers. There are many games you can sort of walk through and be done with even though they don’t do much to entertain, but Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway keeps its issues present in your mind as you keep getting bland items that don’t amount to much, keep seeing the issues with reading the track ahead so you can’t know what hazards are in your path, and lapping the last place racers just nails it in more that you driving somewhat competently is all the game expects from you even on its hardest difficulty. Parapet Peril though makes winning hard in the wrong ways as you keep crashing into the problems with the driving design, so even if you practically sleepwalked your way to that final race you are thrown into a course that almost seems to deliberately invoke the game’s worst problems. The basics of the racing are so flawed that the core systems would need to be overhauled to start to push this game to even negligible badness, but TDK probably just wanted something functional and this game does technically work despite offering little to amuse yourself with besides laughing at odd character sprites and weird race track names like Donkey’s Giant Log Morass.

The low difficulty is always what I come back to when I think of what makes this game incredibly dull rather than excruciating, but upping the AI’s competence could either lead to the kind of competitive racer that keeps you engaged or lead to things being more aggravating as they could actually put up a fight in a game where the systems work mostly against you and you alone. If the AI was smarter but also beholden to the same limits as the player then the game could start approaching a more acceptable form. Perhaps TDK thought that an incredibly easy racer would be tolerated by children, but with no excitement to be found from the boring item offerings and technical issues that will impact them more than adults who will more readily realize they need to pick a good character who can avoid barriers and other racers, this party racer feels like it fails even if your standards are incredibly low.