If you are looking for a loopy but ultimately dull rabbit hole to dive into, investigate who owns emojis. You’d think that Sony might own them, as they produced The Emoji Movie in 2017 (starring Patrick Stewart as Poop) but no. They own the emoji featured in the film, but they created those emoji specifically for the film so as not to infringe on the copyrights of companies like Apple and others that have their own sets of emoji. And then there is emoji: The Iconic Brand which has existed for nearly a decade and has licensed their brand of, evidently iconic, emoji to developer and publisher Join Dots to make emoji Kart Racer.
Yes, emoji Kart Racer isn’t related to The Emoji Movie or most of the emoji you use on your phone apps. It is specifically tied to the emoji created by emoji: The Iconic Brand. Does it matter? I don’t really know. What I do know is that if you don’t fall down the rabbit hole of emoji ownership then emoji Kart Racer is just a kart racer with emojis as the drivers.
This is a bit troublesome because while emoji Kart Racer offers up a selection of different emoji to play as (and more unlock as you progress in the game), they are all just variations on the yellow smiley face icon. Which, as you can imagine, is only visible from the front. So, yes emoji Kart Racer leaves you mostly looking at the backs of yellow spheres, no matter which emoji you choose. There are some additional customization options to personalize it for each racer and these amount to hats (like a cowboy hat or a Viking helmet) and different flavors of karts and color schemes. None of the character emojis, hats, or karts have any bearing on the gameplay, so basically it doesn’t really matter what you pick.
With all racers being the same, there is no variation in the gameplay mechanics or deeper strategy involved in selecting your racer or kart. This is fine and not unheard of in the kart racer pantheon, although it is a somewhat generic feeling. None of this matters though if emoji Kart Racer plays well.
So, does it?
Unfortunately, no. Karts accelerate slowly and handle stiffly. That would honestly be rough enough, but emoji Kart Racer also features a kart physics model that hails from another galaxy. If you hit anything on the course you are bound to fly off like a moon rover hit by an asteroid but somehow, with less control. You’ll fly off until you inevitably hit one of the many invisible walls surrounding the courses. In fact, each course seems to take place in an invisible tube. And look, I get the idea behind the invisible barriers, you don’t want players driving off the map. But when hitting an invisible barrier in an awkward fashion result in you careening away wildly, it gets frustrating.
More frustrating is the game locking its progression, including difficulty select, behind grand prix advancement. While emoji Kart Racer has a fairly standard course unlock system (clear grand prix, unlock the next set of four), the game also locks characters, hats, karts, and difficulty behind these tournament completions. You must beat 75% of the game on the terribly boring Easy difficulty before unlocking Normal. And if you want to play on Insane mode, you’ll need to finish it on Normal. That said, I don’t recommend playing on Insane mode as the game’s idea of difficulty is to ramp up the general bullshit that the game throws at you, and again, standard practice in kart racers, but when combined with the slow acceleration, stiff handling, and insanely unpredictable physics, it just isn’t fun. That’s not to say that I think the easy or normal difficulty is fun, because they aren’t. They are just more tolerable.
But the game in general just isn’t something most kart fans are going to want to put much time into. The courses, while colorful and generally nice looking, are generic. They aren’t designed in such a way that running a race on them feels exciting, they just kind of exist. The power-ups are uninspired, with none of them being worthwhile to use outside of the speed boost and for some inexplicable reason, they’ve decided driving over a power up box while you already have a power up equipped will override that powerup, so you can’t even strategically save your speed boost to use later because you are likely to lose it on the next turn. I will say that, while generally useless because it is easy to avoid, the poop drop power up does let out a wet fart noise when you deploy it and that did result in a few chuckles.
I’ve spent a lot of time here, with not a lot of nice things to say, but there are some bright spots. For one, the music is quite good compared to everything else in the game. There is a nice, relaxed vibe to most of the tracks and if I were to return to the game to torture myself for the insane difficulty achievements, I’d do so mostly because the music is cool. Additionally, I must give it to whoever decided that one of the on-track obstacles would be an eggplant patch that needs to be triggered by hitting the eggplant flag. If you know anything about emojis, you know the eggplant is used as code for dick. And if you hit that flag to form the eggplant patch, you are literally being a dick in this game so good on them for that ridiculous innuendo. And speaking of innuendo, the unicorn themed level that has twisting unicorn horns (just the horns) lining the track that look like rotating dildos, A+ design there. No notes.
I like kart racers. I play a ton of them. And I play them with my kids because everyone can play a kart racer. Even with the bad ones, we can have a good time with them, but emoji Kart Racer failed to hold their attention for very long. They liked the music and thought it looked fun enough but playing it was a slog. My youngest (11) yelled out “I think I dropped a turd somewhere” while we were racing and we all had a good laugh at that but four races in, they had all checked out and went back to their phones.
My youngest wasn’t the only one to drop a turd somewhere. Unfortunately, emoji Kart Racer is the equivalent of a kart racing turd. And much like trying to find out who owns emojis, I just cannot recommend it at all.
This review was written with material provided from the developer for the Xbox. For more on our review process, please read here.
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