Table Top Racing: World Tour Review

Table Top Racing World Tour Review Screenshot 1

The overwhelming sense of Grandpa Mario racing around his garage lingers in the back of your mind as you twist and turn your way through these short tracks. Table top racing will offer light relief, that is all it, struggles to hold attention for more than a few hours. You will find yourself wishing that Mario kart had made the console leap and made its way to PS4. That being said Table Top Racing: World Tour is still a good game in its own right, it is just unfortunate that it has to live up to the hype and expectation left in the wake of Mario Kart.

To start with the first thing, you will notice is the caricature style in which the cars are drawn. That immediately takes all seriousness away from the game and shows you the relaxed style and playful nature that was aimed for. This game is not a serious driving sim this is a let your hair down, looking for some light relief / blood boiling frustration every time you get knocked of the track type of game. You will see yourself racing in and against imitation cars. By this I mean they look real and you will know what they are imitating but they have different names due to licensing for example you can get your hands on a Fauxrari. You will also notice an RV that you may want to steer clear of as it’s called Braking’s Bad and yes that was a reference to the roaming meth lab but last time I checked it takes an RV 10yrs to go from 0-60.

Table Top Racing World Tour Review Screenshot 2

You start in the lowest level of racing with the slowest cars and a small selection of race types. As you win races and progress through the championships you will encounter more race types and better cars to drive. Most will find the first championship easy and boring but look at it as your tutorial and the best is still to come. To progress in the championships you have to earn stars from each race you do this by finishing in the top 3 racers and if you finish outside the podium you will have to race again and again until you screech onto the podium in a blaze of glory and toy tire smoke.

Along with the championships you have special events and online multiplayer with the addition of split screen coming in a future update. Special events are events that have been set up for a specific car with specific wheels and a specific XP level you have to reach before you can enter that event. You have to own the car to be able to enter that race also. During your race you pick up little boosts and weapons that you can use to slow your opponents down or gain the advantage. As well as that you can upgrade you tires for defence or offensive purposes, yes think along the lines of the chariot race from Ben-Hur or the majority of Death Race.

Table Top Racing World Tour Review Screenshot 3

As your cars get faster the tracks get harder, and by that I mean the difficulty spike is something of a small mountain. The tracks are the same but the corners are tighter and you find yourself actually using the brakes. Where as in the first championship you just need to position yourself right and you just have to go all out and you’ll forget what your brakes are. As you drive around you will spot different coloured coins. These super coins make you think about using the track in a different way, sometimes it’s obvious how you will collect it. Some are hidden and you have to look out for the little shortcut that hidden in plain sight that will let you collect coins and skip part of the track so you can gain ground if you find yourself in the position where you need a helping hand in making up the ground you lost. Some of the short cuts have to be made yourself by moving objects so that ramps drop, but it might be worth winning the race and championship then come back to do all that because if not you will start to find yourself a long way behind.

Once you have collected all the coins from each track and all the starts for winning the events and all the special events then the game has limited replay ability it will be good for the odd race or maybe some multiplayer but the single player will need DLC to keep it interesting luckily that will come, some has already been released. The audio for Table Top Racing: World Tour was created especially by Wes Smith and it can be found here if you wish to listen to the entire album rather than one race at a time.

Overall Table Top Racing: World Tour is a nice little game for any gamer but don’t take it to serious apart from teaching you the importance of a lead, this game is light-hearted a bit of fun and a decent play. Not as great as its Nintendo counterpart but it still holds its own on the PS4.

Rating 7

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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