Race with Ryan (Xbox One)

Most any kid would love to be the star of their own video game, but Ryan Kaji is not just any kid. Through the Ryan’s World Youtube channel, Ryan and his family have already built up a media empire just by reviewing toys and opening surprise eggs, their preschool audience propelling them to a position where Ryan has already had plenty of merchandise tied to him. In some ways a video game would feel inevitable for a brand that big, and with kart racers already a good fit for casual gaming it’s not even a surprise that Race with Ryan is the form it would take.

Race with Ryan stars Ryan and a group of cartoon racers who also characters from the Ryan’s World brand, the player able to choose from characters like Combo Panda and Gus the Gummy Gator as well as Ryan who has been adjusted to fit the colorful and round art style better. While you can pick to play as a nerdy penguin, friendly shark, or gamer kitty, there doesn’t seem to be any appreciable difference between the racers when it comes to how they play. All of the racers also have multiple vehicle types separated from each other on the character select screen, some of the options rather normal vehicle types like a police car while others are more fanciful like a pirate ship turned car or things like a helicopter or UFO that still just drive on a set of wheels rather than fly. There being no difference between the racers does at least mean kids will be able to pick whichever character gels with them, but the selection menu scattering them so that all the character variants are not together is an odd form of obfuscation to getting to the racer you want to play as.

Despite the playable racers all being presented in a round and gentle colorful style, Ryan and his family will actually appear in live action footage and still images throughout a lot of the experience. You will never forget that this is Ryan’s game as he reads out every menu option, pops up during races no matter who you play as to react to your driving, and introduces the different cup tournaments you play in. The odd thing about this direction though is that the recordings used aren’t professionally done or even edited the best. When Ryan is giving the game’s tutorial or introducing certain race tracks you can hear the microphone pop as it is activated for the recording and you can hear some feedback problems when it peaks from Ryan failing to manage his volume levels. When Ryan is sitting on the couch with his mother and father to introduce the cups it is probably at its worse though, the acoustics for the room leading to a strong echo that can make it hard to hear what they’re even saying to each other. Thankfully they usually aren’t saying anything important, doing things like telling pirate jokes before the pirate-themed tournament, but even if you accept this game is going to have constant talking to appeal to its 2-6 year old demographic, the quality of the speech makes it a bit more grating. The cartoon characters all have properly done voice acting though, the characters popping up before the tournament and after races to react to the results but having a surprisingly small selection of lines to pull from. At least you won’t be straining to hear their repeated reactions, but in general when you can hear things there is a level of supportive positivity that won’t upset young players.

When it comes to the racing, the handling of the driving is actually fairly good. It hits on the kind of accessible control a young player would likely want, turning left and right straightforward without the vehicle resisting the action much even if it is a rather sharp shift in direction. It’s not overly responsive either so you won’t be spinning in circles for holding the direction for a bit, and Race with Ryan also includes some options where you can have the game guide your driver a bit to further make driving easier even for the youngest of gamers. Interestingly enough though the game does feature a drifting maneuver that is easy to pull off with the game’s many wide turns. However, if you do integrate even a few drifts into your driving, you’ll pretty much leave all the competition in the dust. Even if you play on the game’s highest difficulty the computer controlled racers are barely a worry, so much so that you can often get into first early and hold that position so well you’ll start passing the people in last place. Lapping other racers is probably preferable over the game giving artificial advantages to other drivers to have them catch up no matter how well you’re doing, but with all the other racers being pushovers it can often feel like you’re hardly racing anyone at all and just driving along the track until you’ve finished enough laps to win.

Race with Ryan features six tracks that it does its best to recycle. There are six cup tournaments but hardly enough tracks to fill them, the smallest cup containing three tracks and the final one going for all six courses in a row. To try and stretch out this content though there are reverse versions of every course but running them backwards doesn’t really alter how you approach them much, especially since Race with Ryan has a very simplistic approach to track design. As you go through a course you’ll find a fair few junctions, one of the paths ahead longer than the other but with little incentive for taking it. You’ll see different hazards sometimes but they’re often very tame and occasionally you’ll be able to grab more items on one route but items in general are so abundant that you’ll never be starving for them to the point you need to adjust your driving to grab one. Essentially you just need to figure out which route after the split is the shorter way forward and take it every time with no real reason to deviate from that plan, and when you’re racing that track in reverse later you just need to remember things are flipped and still take the same optimal path. To make things worse, the three difficulties are treated as separate cups to overcome, and while the unlockable racers are all just the same characters driving in different vehicles, earning them will require playing on separate difficulties rather than potentially earning everything through playing on Hard.

One thing Race with Ryan does do with its paltry six tracks is fill them with colorful moving objects suitable for its young audience. When you race through Ryan’s Room or the Toy Shop you’re micro-sized and zipping past large moving toys of many types, the player finding themselves dodging bouncing balls, wind-up robots, and driving up toy race tracks. The toy shop incorporates some fun ideas like having the automatic door on the fritz, although you can easily slip past it so it’s more of an aesthetic danger than a real one. The tropical pirate island has plenty of bouncing magma rocks that similarly look dangerous until you realize they move in reliable ways, and the creatures that move across the track in the theme park aren’t even too damaging to hit into since you can easily get back up to speed afterwards. Mostly the backdrops serve as visual treats with a good amount of work differentiating them, but very quickly you’ll get tired of the drives through the rehashed tracks as they are often too wide to force engagement with dangerous things and the AI racers will lag too far behind to keep things competitive. There are some purchasable DLC tracks that up the total count to the more palatable 10, but the game still rehashes them too often and they still go for visual flair over racing substance.

The item system could have been Race with Ryan’s saving grace, but the selection of items are underwhelming and often ineffective. Surprise Eggs are placed liberally around the race courses and give you an item when you drive through them, but they’re so common you’re sometimes barely given time to think about how you might want to use one before the opportunity to grab another appears. Some eggs are at least placed a little off the optimal driving route to lessen the barrage of free items but you’re often going to be cycling through them so quickly that you stop thinking about how to use them and just need to keep the churn going. You can get items like a rotating burger trio around your character that probably won’t do much since rarely is the race so close you’ll be within range to touch someone with it, a shield power that doesn’t protect against every incoming danger, and two variations on a speed boost that can almost feel like overkill unless you’re playing multiplayer with people who have a small chance of keeping up, but the interesting things about Race with Ryan is the items aren’t balanced much based on your position. You will seemingly get those boosts less, but you’ll not be left with only the weakest items in first place, although this might be because the effectiveness of any single item in this game is limited. You can place some dangers on the track like fake surprise eggs and toxic puddles, although even after playing through the game I still don’t know what the glue that you spray behind you does since it doesn’t seem to leave a trail or impact your own abilities. If you are hit by an item you’ll do a badly animated spin that will sometimes twirl you around in the opposite direction than expected, but the limited danger these present makes them easy to recover from and unexciting to use.

THE VERDICT: With only six tracks in the base game that the cup tournaments keep recycling despite their weak designs, Race with Ryan already gets off on a bad foot. The driving is actually responsive and there was definitely a lot of work put into making the race courses look interesting, but driving them becomes a tedious affair as the AI can’t even keep up with a mildly competent player on its hardest difficulty setting. Items are too abundant while also barely impacting the race so races boil down to taking the same optimal route that asks very little of your driving skills. Ryan and his family are constantly injected into the experience in an awkward way as well, the voice recordings used subpar and unprofessional despite their prominence and the fact they’re probably the reason a kid would be playing this game in the first place.

And so, I give Race with Ryan for Xbox One…

A TERRIBLE rating. The surprisingly solid handling and inclusion of an easily executed drift could have made this a solid kart racer for younger players, but it seems Race with Ryan might have picked up some bad habits from the kinds of products Ryan covers on his Youtube channel. Instead of giving us a robust set of race tracks they locked a fair few behind separate purchases and designed the actual racing to lose its appeal quickly as the opposition is barely capable of keeping up unless you are really playing poorly. Even a particularly young player will probably run into the issue of the AI racers being abysmal, the driving assistance practically enough to shove them towards a win on its own and the items rarely playing a major part in the outcome of the race despite how you’re able to grab them every few seconds. There was definitely some attention given to the appearance of the race tracks with the backdrops being bright and busy, but again a toy can use blinking lights and motion to keep a child occupied with even the most basic of play experiences. Race with Ryan executes its driving competently but the courses never ask much of you, perhaps banking on a child’s inability to make a mental map sound enough to remember which way to turn at the same junctions they’ll be hitting multiple times just playing through the six cups. The minimap does make the best path clear though so you don’t really need to retain it anyway, but even if you boot this up with a few other human players you won’t find much interactivity between racers and anyone who can do even a minimal amount of drifting will rocket ahead of the pack uncontested.

If you have a child who is a Ryan’s World fan, you first probably should dissuade them of that since it has broken quite a few rules on advertising to children. However if they are committed enough to the brand they still beg you for this unexciting racer, maybe try to sneak Race with Ryan into your home as a rental as it likely won’t hold their attention long. They might be dazzled by some of the busy backgrounds that try to distract from plain race course designs, but the bland items and limited amount of content mean they’ll probably treat this like many other new toys: play with it for a few minutes while it’s new and go back to the tried and true. Needless to say its low difficulty and its bland tracks means an older player has no reason to really play it and the constant injection of the real Ryan all over the place adds an unusual awkwardness to doing so, but even if you were looking for a bright and colorful racer for a kid it’s not like it’s a genre that lacks suitable options. Hopefully Ryan at least was happy to have his own video game and he does at least seem pretty positive and energetic during all the footage and voice recording he had to go through for this, so even if this game has little to offer anyone else, I won’t be too bothered by it existing if it gave one kid something he always dreamed of having.