The Shrekoning: Shrek Smash n’ Crash Racing (PS2)

Similar to how Shrek SuperSlam showed that the idea of a Shrek fighting game isn’t a completely flawed idea when TDK isn’t handing the brand, four years after Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway we’d see the grumpy green ogre step back onto a racing circuit, this time without any actual karts to muddy up his party racer.

Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing involves the characters and settings of the Shrek film franchise up to the second film, the odd setup for the game being simple enough. Shrek and his friends seem to have a bit of a competitive streak as of late, and after Shrek and the Gingerbread Man see who can hold their breath longer, Donkey comes running in and inadvertently makes a better way for them to compete. Having found the Fairy Godmother’s wand but having no understanding of how to use it properly, Donkey accidentally turns nearby objects into perfect racing creatures and vehicles, and from there everyone seems pretty eager to be off to the races without any real prize beyond bragging rights.

This quick setup helps explains some of the more unusual rides featured in Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing, Shrek himself poised atop a shaggy moss-covered swamp beast that was created by Donkey’s magical antics altering a snail. It helps explain why Dragon is small enough to be a ride for her mate Donkey in a competition where everyone is of a similar size, and while we don’t ever see things like Puss in Boots getting the bull he rides about, we are already predisposed to silly rides in a game where Princess Fiona’s ride is a vehicle that somehow has hover technology. There are 12 racers total, some of them recognizable characters from the film like the Three Little Pigs now on a flying blanket and the puppet Pinocchio appropriately riding a toy steed while others are characters from other nursery rhymes and fairy tales. These added characters are the usual batch Shrek games like to add in like Red Riding Hood back once more but now with the interesting touch of riding the Big Bad Wolf and making an unexpected return form Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway comes the less commonly included Goldilocks who similarly rides a large mammal with Papa Bear filling that role.

Picking your driver in Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing is important to your potential enjoyment of the game as there are quite a few characters with slippery handling who can struggle to take turns while others can do so with little effort. The game does try to counterbalance greater handling with lower speed-related stats and the characters with looser handling can often make up for it by briefly taking your finger off the acceleration, but the speed penalties aren’t severe enough to really discourage picking certain characters and often the ones with better handling are fairly fast still. There is almost a pretty clear divide in who handles well and who doesn’t, many of the characters who rely on a flying form of transportation able to take turns much easier, but while this is true for many characters like Fiona and Donkey you still see the Pigs having a bit of slipperiness despite that. You also have Red Riding Hood able to turn fairly well despite her mount having his paws on the ground, but since the game doesn’t show you any statistics on the selection screen the metric for finding good racers will be experimentation. Oddly enough, Shrek has some of the worst handling in the cast, a poor way to introduce new players if they try to dive right in. Additionally, you might find your choice of racer impacted by how much you can tolerate their shallow pool of voice lines, each character having so few possible reactions that even in a single race they can grow repetitive.

The races in Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing can vary in length depending on the size of the race track. Racers compete to complete anywhere from 3 to 5 laps depending on the course, the game featuring a set of 12 that it tries to extend into a bit more with an unlockable Mirror Mode where the design of the tracks are flipped. This tracks can be played in solo races, time trials where no preexisting rankings exist to compete against, and most importantly the Tournament and Cup Tournament formats. You can only unlock the new characters through these modes, with each of the four cups and their mirror variants providing an addition to the roster. However, playing in Cup Tournament isn’t actually too productive when compared to regular Tournament. Tournament strings either the 12 normal or 12 mirror tracks together in a row, and the only way to unlock the Mirror Mode is through completing the default tournament. Tournament basically just packages the cups together, even down to the fact that the scoring system treats them as separate cups. To win a cup in either mode involves having a higher cumulative score across the three tracks of a cup, the player earning more points for higher placements in a race and able to come back from a worse performance in one race by placing highly in the next. Three races per cup does make this a bit more difficult, but so long as you don’t finish a race you can retry it without penalty from the pause menu and coming back from something like third place in one race is achievable.

The good news about the small track selection is the courses do a surprisingly good job differentiating themselves and embracing different ideas. The Farmland track may sound tame until you get past that opening segment and find the giant tornado that launches you up onto the beanstalk you race down, Far Far Away Castle has a lot of sharp turns and tight spaces to navigate both inside the building and out, and Dragon’s Castle has plenty of precarious and thin strips of land or constantly active hazards like fire-breathing dragons to make for a race where you need to actively avoid many dangers. What’s more, the game tries to make sure the path is continuously branching or splitting, sometimes in small ways that don’t really have an impact but would allow you to avoid any items players have placed down and others being actual shortcuts, trap drops, or ways to earn extra rewards like item barrels or boosts. In levels like the Potion Factory Interior you will have junctions where one path is superior in most every way and in the Mountain Pass the rolling boulders are hardly concerning enough that you’d take the long u-bend instead of cutting across their path. Other levels like the Green Forest have so many viable different paths at once that you can easily move between them, making for a wider set of driving options than simple racing corridors. Not every idea is a winner, Potion Factory Exterior has a mandatory giant jump that always has a little awkwardness involved when racers land, but you also have the option to jump with your vehicle to get to different parts of the track that emphasizes the idea that Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing wants you to pick your way forward.

The frequent options for which route to take and the sometimes wider stretches of track may seem a bit much for a game with a maximum of six racers on the course at once, but the items take advantage of this structure with many of them designed as traps. A jack-in-the-box with the old Shrek villain Farquaad’s face will lunge back and forth, the player needing to time when they drive past the trap if they don’t want to be hit and sent spinning out. Jack-o-Lanterns on the track are like clearly visible mines, but as everyone keeps grabbing item barrels during the race, the road becomes more packed with them and things like the beanstalks block a big chunk of the road to potentially deny thinner side paths or push players towards danger. These three items definitely feel like the most prevalent and consistently impactful since they shape how you decide to drive, but there are items like the goose and balloon frog that can hit players around you when released, Ogre Strength that gives you a big speed boost, or Pixie Dust that lets you boost yourself with multiple uses until its exhausted. Some even slip into defensive roles like the Shield for item protection or Tornado that sucks up hazards and can damage other racers. The garden gnome you toss to hit other players doesn’t feel like it has much of a punch comparatively, and the Swamp Gas smokescreen isn’t disorienting at all, but the final Freeze item is an interesting one since everyone but you is briefly frozen and will slide forward until they either hit something and break free or eventually thaw after a few seconds.

The reason the ice item is so interesting is it is clearly designed as the kind of tool someone doing poorly in the race would benefit from getting, but Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing doesn’t really seem to have the expected item balancing other party racers engage in. You can get that frost power in first place, and with a good set of items themed around leaving traps in the path behind you, being in first place still lets you have fun with items since you can decide how to deny the racers behind you track space. In another interesting touch, all characters have a basic attack they can execute as often as they like, this good for clobbering a racer trying to get ahead of you even if you don’t have an item to assist at the time. The reach is very short so often times you need to move over to smack them, but they can also smack back, even if the AI players are perhaps a bit too tame to realize this. Racing other humans can better realize the potential behind many of the tracks and you can even do tournaments together with a friend, but AI racers can fall behind pretty easily in the races thanks to what seems to be a lack of artificial enhancements to their abilities based on your performance. They don’t seem to get any faster to remain competitive and instead level design often gives them little tricks to potentially catch up if you don’t take the optimal routes, and this also means being hit by an item or falling off-track aren’t going to doom a race if you were doing well beforehand. However, this can also manifest as a general lack of challenge overall, especially since the computer racers don’t seem to detect track hazards and traps well so they further sabotage themselves. Safe and consistent driving isn’t challenged too much by the other racers and unless it’s late in the final lap you can usually retake first place without too much issue, the low difficulty certainly making it easy to clear all the tracks and their mirror versions and then be left with little more to do.

THE VERDICT: Track design is king in Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing and the small set of 12 ends up an enjoyable bunch but hardly enough to keep the player playing for long. The courses have plenty of interesting set pieces, dangers, and splitting paths, their design accommodating many trap-based items as well as giving players more reason to vary how they drive. A good batch of the playable racers are a bit too slippery without the upsides to match, but it’s the AI racers being mostly pushovers that makes it too easy to blitz through the game’s content. There is a lot of creativity put into the track aesthetics, dangers, and shortcuts, but the game needs to be a more exciting and competitive racer to realize the many interesting ideas brought to the table.

And so, I give Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing for PlayStation 2…

An OKAY rating. While it’s easy to commend a racing game that plays fair, the AI racers seemingly getting no artificial boosts to keep up and the items not skewing based on placement, there are reasons other games utilize those ideas. The computer players maybe don’t need to cheat but having more than just the basic and mirror tournament could have helped there, multiple difficulty levels to raise their competence a simple way to beef up the game’s offerings and provide more challenge outside of getting another human player to play with you. The 12 tracks on offer would be a good set for a game that could provide more reasons to revisit them though, the game having an interesting approach to designing them where you are fairly frequently offered multiple ways to move forward. This not only allows you to find better routes through experimentation but makes some of them situationally superior if you need to avoid items. Most of the items are a good fit for the style of racing on offer and having a few duds like Swamp Gas isn’t too damaging to the experience in the same way the odd issues with the Potion Factory Exterior’s big jump doesn’t drag the experience down since most other major track design ideas work fairly well. Perhaps the game should have evened out the cast a bit so that new players aren’t given such slippery characters like Shrek to start with that can give the wrong impression and require more effort to use with little reward for that mastery, but the big thing holding this back from being a more enjoyable racing title is that all of the interesting options are found while on the track rather than the game having a good set of menu options to vary up the experience some more and make it last.

Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing is a bit too lean and easy for it’s own good, but it is a competent and sometimes imaginative Shrek-based racing game and one that even has a clear design approach to its race courses. A racer about many paths forward where the appeal of them shifts based on the dangers placed by other players feels like a fine fit for a more casual racing game experience, but Shrek: Smash n’ Crash Racing leaned a little too hard towards casual play and it doesn’t provide much that takes advantage of that gameplay direction. It can be fine to dabble in the multiplayer occasionally and younger players may find the AI racers worthy competition and get more out of it, but so long as you pick a decent character even and older player can still have a fine time racing through the small offerings presented here.