Cars: Race-O-Rama (PS3)
While the incidental similarities between the second video game based on Pixar’s Cars franchise and the second Cars film that would release years later are amusing, the fact that the sequel to Cars: Mater-National Championship would also have some coincidental congruities with the third Cards film makes it even funnier. In Cars 3, hot shot race car Lightning McQueen finds his dominance on the track challenged by a new generation of racers, and in his efforts to train up to be able to tackle them, he learns that it can be just as rewarding to train up a new racer and help them succeed instead. In Cars: Race-O-Rama, Lightning McQueen’s dominance is also challenged by a new generation of racers, but he believes he can outrace them while also guiding his own team of racers.
Where the film and game definitely diverge though is Lightning McQueen’s race team is practically irrelevant in the game, the player always playing as Lightning in the story mode and needing to outplace all of the other racers to beat missions and earn the gold trophies even if one of the seven other racers on the track is nominally from his team. Cars: Race-O-Rama keeps its focus mostly on the player character at the expense of any message, but there are some other elements to give this world full of living cars a bit more character and fun moments. Chick Hicks, Lightning’s rival from the first film, returns as the instructor of these new cars that are meant to challenge Lightning’s reign and his pupils all have some sort of personality that makes the showdowns with them a bit more interesting. The rich stuck-up race car Candice looks down on our hero while El Machismo not only behaves like Macho Man Randy Savage as he promises to go wild in his races against McQueen but he is literally voiced by that over the top wrestler. The tow truck Mater has Larry the Cable Guy backing him once again, the affable redneck of a vehicle having his own subplot where he races against some other tow trucks just as dim as him as they practically unknowingly compete over towing rights for the area. With Michael Keaton as Chick Hicks and John Goodman voicing the Monsters Inc. inspired Sulley monster truck that crops up occasionally things are surprisingly star-studded even though Lightning McQueen is relegated to once again just using a very accurate Owen Wilson imitator.
Driving in Cars: Race-O-Rama is responsive and involves more than just turning corners and avoiding collisions. Drifting has been overhauled from its appearance in Cars: Mater-National Championship, it much easier to do on the fly by kicking out your back end to the side, but drifting well can be difficult if you don’t account for the steepness of the turn. A meter appears to help you visualize how well you’re drifting, the car eventually losing speed if you kick out too far or pull in too deep. If you drift right though you can take huge bends at spend or even slip right back into another drift quickly to take the next turn on even heavily winding roads. Drifting also serves a vital purpose in restoring your boost meter more quickly. You begin with a rather large bar of boost you can use to get a surge of speed, the full meter actually rather sizeable so that it can be used frequently provided you know how to build it up. Performing large jumps and other special maneuvers will help regenerate it as well, so if you play stylishly enough you can potentially make up for lost ground after a mistake or collision.
Collisions are probably one place where Cars: Race-O-Rama feels like it needed more polish. While weaving around the track has a good sense of control and this is the cartoonish kind of game where tilting onto your side to two-wheel drive lets you take an incredibly sharp quick turn, the collisions certainly stretch plausibility when something goes awry like watching Mater pirouette across the track on his nose. Many crashes might be as simple as losing speed or maybe rolling over, but others can send cars flying off into the air or spinning wildly, and while this makes some sense when a monster truck’s high suspension leads to chaos when it gets tipped, seeing a regular car flip out when it makes contact with something mundane is a double-edged sword. Sure, it’s nice when an opponent faces the wrath of this fickle physics system, but when you are the victim it’s a lot less amusing. Scraping barriers or getting bullied by other racers rarely triggers this thankfully, so usually this only becomes a consistent issue in some of the game’s harder tracks where you should have been more cautious taking turns or avoiding hazards anyway.
Speaking of the difficulty, Cars: Race-O-Rama has a remarkably good handling on it. Even on Normal you’ll find the other racers put up a good fight and one cataclysmic failure or a bunch of smaller ones can mean you miss out on grabbing the top spot. The race tracks are also surprisingly varied, making good use of Cars: Race-O-Rama’s greater area variety than its predecessor to construct distinct and multi-faceted courses. There is still the element of exploring wide open hub areas to select your mission, but this mostly seems to be a way to get to know the location before you start having missions that require some area knowledge to get good times. While a lot of the area is wasted space as a hub, the large locations are all transitioned nicely into race tracks.
The humble roadside town of Radiator Springs has the two other hub areas from the previous game stapled onto it to make a huge location with desert, canyons, mines, and forested roads, the game closing off portions to make courses that feel distinct even though you might be covering small bits of ground that feature as part of a different segmented version of the map. Santa Carburera is a very different area in terms of presentation though, this seaside town inspired by Santa Monica having a beach, amusement park, and a lot more buildings that mean roads can have much more angular turns or blocked sight lines demanding quicker reactions. Autovia is a mountainous area with a little wild west town and some factories, but its most notable feature is suddenly introducing robotic car racers who compete against you with little explanation on why they’re now a factor. Motoropolis is definitely the area most committed to city racing though, the downtown district completely urban with its skyscrapers, tunnels, and even segments where you can leap across rooftops. Motoropolis seems to have the fewest unique divisions for its racing space though while Radiator Springs quite reasonably has the most since it is the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of available space, but the game makes effective use of all its locations to build some entertaining race tracks that will test your handling and flexibility, many even featuring multiple split paths or shortcuts that reward players for being more daring or taking the harder to reach route.
Cars: Race-O-Rama quite wisely keeps most of its single-player missions tied to the core racing mechanics but finds different ways to twist them to keep them varied. You of course have plenty of straightforward races, but then you have Point-to-Point challenges where it’s one long course rather than a set of laps, Auto Cross where you need to balance speed and caution as you drive through tight but short obstacle courses where making contact with anything loses you time, monster truck races where your car turns less smoothly but thankfully can still be controlled fairly well, and a pair of relay races where you change your car every lap even though the other vehicles don’t feel starkly different. Some Transporter missions add in a unique element by letting you drive however you like to the destination, meaning the player is able to plot their own course through the large open world areas, while others like Photo Op require you to find a specific spot and then hit the jump properly to hit the midair photo marker right.
The game definitely does a good job of helping the racing find new forms so it never settles into a rut, but not everything is a winner. Guido Kart feels hastily thrown together and prone to constant bugs and errors. Here you race as a forklift against other small cars, but your three-wheeler is up against more stable four-wheelers and thus you are already at a maneuvering disadvantage. However, the bigger issues than your unreliable turning are the tiny closed off areas you race in, it proving to be very easy to accidentally clip through barriers or the environment to go outside the bounds of the race or even fall through the world entirely. AI racers will sometimes slam into the wall themselves as they can barely handle this rickety mode, and for some reason this mode is the one that has a short pointless wind-up scene play after every retry to slow down the inevitable resets. There are some items you can get from pick-ups like a speed boost or smokescreen, but these can screw you over as well as you rocket off and get jammed into something. Guido Kart is optional though, but in a game where it’s pretty enjoyable to engage with most of the optional content it stands out like a sore thumb due to how it seems barely thought out and barely holds together.
Some other minigames like finding lost tires are a bit aimless but rather inoffensive, but Mater comes in with a few fun additions that do break from the racing mold without feeling out of place. The player can do a canyon jump as Mater in a daredevil role, pretend to be a bullfighter against bulldozers in a game of chicken, and even head to a unique Tokyo map to do a drifting challenge. Lightning gets a few drifting and stunt challenges himself, but they are sprinkled carefully over the experience so you’re never spending too much time with these simpler modes but also get to have a quick and fun break from the regular racing from time to time. Along with some collectible car parts during races and plenty of unlockable racers for the multiplayer versions of the main game’s content, Cars: Race-O-Rama manages to have a surprisingly strong spread of enjoyable and varied experiences and goals that allow it to be a fairly good racing game all around.
THE VERDICT: While the crash physics can sometimes be absurd and Guido Kart is glitchy garbage, Cars: Race-O-Rama is mostly a fun racer that manages its mechanics and course design incredibly well. The drift, boost, and tipping all build off an already responsive set of controls to give you more options during a race while the tracks shift in visual design and complexity frequently as you are given plenty of alternate routes to take while driving across varied approaches to how tight, twisty, or bumpy roads can be. The story scenes are simple yet add a little more life to the affair and many of the minigames and alternate missions are nice changes to the racing formula or something short, unique, and enjoyable in their simplicity.
And so, I give Cars: Race-O-Rama for PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. It’s pretty easy to dismiss a tie-in game for Pixar’s less than thrilling Cars franchise, but Cars: Race-O-Rama doesn’t take the easy road to providing something playable. The responsive driving only ever hits hiccups during the occasional physics mishap, but otherwise it’s a great way to get around courses that vary up their shape and what they demand of you often. The AI racers put up a good fight without having to crank up the difficulty too high and only Guido Kart feels like it has outright difficulty issues, but that’s because that mode is held together with rubber bands and paper clips. The rest of Cars: Race-O-Rama does a nice job recontextualizing how you race, providing objectives that can ask for creativity, quick reactions, or expert handling to get the best time, and then there are a few simpler ideas sprinkled in just for fun that don’t overstay their welcome. The hub areas are definitely a bit bland when you’re just looking for the next mission, but the way the game divides these spaces for missions leads to much of the game’s success, that subtle conditioning in having you drive around these areas before races paying off in that track knowledge isn’t only gained by retrying a map until you know its twists and turns.
It might be hard to swallow for people who find the Cars franchise hard to invest themselves in, but even as someone who wasn’t wowed by the films, Cars: Race-O-Rama provided a fun twist on racing games without breaking too far away from the inherent thrill of going at high speeds. Drifting and boosting are simple but solid additions that are easy to integrate in your driving, and while the fact the cars are alive and talking as they race might put some players off, the tracks and controls would definitely pass muster even in a less cartoonish racer. It may be a little odd to belittle a franchise that has proven so popular, but considering it angles for a young demographic and it has become widely known as a merchandising juggernaut where a tie-in game could very well be a cash-in, it feels important to emphasize that this isn’t some barebones thrown together product. It might not be some passion project or anything, but it does attempt to be something legitimately enjoyable and succeeds most of the time, filling a rather nice niche as a less serious but still somewhat deep racing game.