Super Toy Cars feels like a game that escaped out of early access with a reassuring smile and a lot of fundamental issues unaddressed.

As I was playing through it I kept having to double check that it was indeed fully released and not still undergoing development, with so many prevalent bugs and a general lack of basic racing necessities popping up as if I had somehow been slipped a beta build in place of the final game. But Super Toy Cars is indeed "finished", or at least unlikely to receive any major future updates, so we're left with the game we've been given and it's a rather disappointing end result to something that started off with such promise.

Super Toy Cars wants to occupy a space between kart racers and somewhat more realistic arcade racers, with the handling and track designs of the latter and the zany power-ups and silliness so often associated with the former. In reality it adheres almost entirely to traditional arcade racing, with the inclusion of power-ups being rather unnecessary and pretty useless on the whole. There was rarely an instance where launching a missile or dropping an oil spill gave me any noticeable advantage, occasionally being a slight annoyance but usually something I forgot was even there.

I think a lot of this though has to do with how spaced out racers inevitably get over the course of a race. After the first lap I would often be so far behind or ahead of everyone else that there wasn't any chance I'd be able to hit someone with a power-up even should I want to, and even in the rare instance I was in the middle of the pack it so often felt like I was the only one driving. It's a mystery to me how so many racers can exist on such a small track and remain largely entirely separate from each other, but it definitely makes the game feel rather isolating when the only reminder that you're racing against someone is the fraction in the upper corner of the screen.

Again this is linked to another issue in the game, that being how unbalanced the different cars are and the laughably inept AI racers the game pits you against. Drift is by far the most important stat in the game, so much so that it means cars with a high drift rating will almost always be far and away the best vehicles in the game, rendering all but two or three cars impractical to try and drive. After only a few races I'd settled upon the Panther and found myself dominating every race despite driving like an absolute madman and crashing into things on a near constant basis. If the game starts out easy it trickles down to a virtual void of challenge, as I blew through race after race wondering if I had somehow been caught in a loop and wasn't actually moving forward in events.

Keeping with the trend of every issue being intrinsically linked to another, that feeling of consistent repetition is the result of an abundance of redundancies in track designs and event types. There are only twelve tracks in the game, and at least half of them feel almost interchangeable with one another, with the others being iconic mostly for their backgrounds and not any interesting track layout. The handful of different event types again double up on each other, with checkpoint and single lap time trials feeling nearly identical and the only alteration between elimination and evade being the obnoxious mines placed along the track. There's already a noticeable lack of content in Super Toy Cars, but having so much of it feel so similar to each other and stretch on so long somehow seems worse than if the game had just been half as long.

The monotonous grind of repeated events robs the game of any sense of progression. You aren't looking forward to new tracks because there aren't any; you aren't looking to improve your skills because the AI is never challenging you. There's no desire to buy new cars as so many are useless, and upgrades are needless and so inexpensive you can be fully upgraded after only a half dozen races or less.

And then there are the usual hallmarks of unfinished games: glitchy audio, constant collision issues, hitting invisible walls and clipping through solid ones, random frame rate drops, and a rather embarrassingly bare bones online mode (which doesn't even support private lobbies or inviting friends).

I like what Super Toy Cars is going for, and I think with a few more months of development it could have become a lot more than it did, but being ostensibly finished it feels pointless to hold out hope that its problems will ever be fixed, or that it's even in a state that could be remedied with a few patches. I'm not sure if it was pushed out the door early or its developers really thought it was finished, but the end result is still a game that's in need of attention it won't receive.

You can read more of my writing on Kritiqal[kritiqal.com].

This was pretty obviously made by people who loved the hell out of Re-Volt on the Dreamcast. As well they should, because Re-Volt owned. This one tries but is a little too buggy and unpolished to make the mark. There's a good variety of cars but the tracks are pretty samey, with no good gimmicks or unique features and some frustrating invisible walls. The drifting mechanic is also pretty weird and stiff if you're used to Mario Kart, but I got the hang of it eventually. Races aren't too hard if you keep buying and upgrading new cars, though it should be mentioned that there's zero rubberbanding, which is both a blessing and a curse. If one CPU driver pulls away from the pack he can be impossible to catch, forcing a restart if you want gold. Most races are basic time trials or eliminations, but there is one neat one called Evade where the track is covered in mines, and the last place car is eliminated every 15 seconds. Those races are more about driving carefully than fast, and they can be pretty intense. It's not a bad game, just an unpolished one. I got all the way through it but I wouldn't recommend it unless you are dying for an arcade racer right now.

- Feels unfinished
- Controls and collision detection are a bit off.
- Speed is rather slow

Note: One cool feature this game has.

When you lay a bomb behind you, a little rear view window pops up and stays on screen until someone hits your bomb. So you can see if your placement was any good... Thumbs up for that..

This looked fun, but it really isn't. This game is plegued with issues. Vehicle handling is horrid, some cars stick to the track like crazy and others with start drifting if you turn even slightly. Really bad aliasing issues reguadless of the setting, Boring power ups. Hitboxes on cars are terrible and invisible walls are everwhere. maps are so-so nothing really special. the toy cars simply don't feel like toy cars. Go grab toybox turbo or blazerush instead.

It seems that the game doesn't know, if it wants to be a top-down or a third-person (from behind) racer. From top-down the controls are quite decent, but it is hard to recognize some things (for example if your car is jumping/airborne) and sometimes your seight is even blocked, However you also can't play properly in third-person view because there the controls feel wonky.

The coffin nail for the game is its horrible collision detection. Other reviewers already mentioned it.

Now, lets set somthing straight before we get started

I was raised on Re-Volt, Crash Team Racing and Mario Kart

Do you now what all 3 of those games have in common? They are all interesting with a fair bit of replayability

Re-Volt made you feel like you were handling actual toy cars, in addition to having an impressive selection of cars/tracks
Crash Team Racing was just the best. Small-ish selection for cars and tracks. But the power-ups and the sheer uniqueness of the entire game made this a gem
Mario Kart was the great grandfather of kart racing, and had a fairly large track selection and had plenty of multiplayer mayhem

Does Super Toy Cars do this?
Yes. For about an hour and a half. Then it gets *really* dull *REALLY* quickly

The number of tracks described in the description is slightly wrong, or at least pretty misleading. They mean there are 12 tracks TOTAL, and there are 4 different locations TOTAL. It doesnt mean "there are 12 tracks in 4 locations for a total of 48 tracks" Moreover, the tracks are very simple affairs, nothing really unique about them at all

The cars are meh. Between the hitboxes being helariously random (as they collide with the track funkily, making drifting a chore when you clip a tube wall wrong, or get bumped out of a drift by a guy 3 feet away). This also makes ramming quite literally a hit or miss situation

Also, each car has stats that determine how they run. The only way to see these stats is to go into the campaign mode and memorize them, as you cannot see the during "quick race" or "multiplayer" modes. But again, unless if its an extreme stat (insanely high or low) you will not notice a difference. Without fail the high speed models (formula 1 car generally) will have a piece of cake for the races, where as the more maneuverable or more weighty models get lapped constantly with very little balancing

The powerups are lame. There is not much really to be said about them other than they feel weak because of the funky physics on the car's part. If a car gets hit with an 8ball (a very powerful weapon) it kind of gets spun a little... It also has the annoying feature of replacing your powerup whenever you drive over a new one. Making sure that you cant save them for when you need them

So in summary, I would give Super Toy Cars a 4/10

Its not a bad game, just a game done poorly. Pick it up if its on sale for 4 dollars or less, but dont expect much


TL:DR VERSION
Ok racing game gets boring quickly. Spend 10 dollars elsewhere

An extremely tepid, generic, forgettable experience. It's a decent time-waster, for sure, and I genuinely have to admire the sense of scale and speed, as well as the colorful track design. However, the concerningly massive number of typos are a first sign that the experience is a bit slapdash, and the downright uncomfortable drifting mechanic makes Ridge Racer Unbounded seem comparatively intuitive (this game has two ways to use the handbrake and neither really works well).

AI competitors are inept to a childish degree, and I don't mean how a child plays a video game like this. I mean when they're bored inside a real car and run the car up a wall and then keep bumping it against the seat. I watched in amused awe as no less than three of the AI at once all decided not to take the turn ahead and instead wedge themselves into a corner, respawn before the corner, and do it again. And again. And again.

Visually, it's a mess. I mean, it's very neatly modeled and colorful and well designed, but this is all marred by a very questionable blurring effect that applies depth of field or... something, extremely wonkily. It just looks like vaseline smeared on random parts of the camera.

Audio-wise, the actual vehicle audio is decently okay. The pop-style soundtrack is genuinely impressive, except for the very repetitive main menu tune. Like, seriously, I see why the soundtrack provider is shown prominently in advertising for the game and on the first loading screen. It's pretty damn good. Though with lyrics about having women in one arm and booze in the other, it makes me figure this isn't supposed to be a kid's game, which makes me wonder who it actually IS for. Bored twenty-somethings and up looking for a bit of nostalgia of the good old days banging toy cars against each other like myself, I suppose. In any case, I totally want to find more of the musician's work, because it's really great, really serene. The high point of the game by a long shot.

I have extremely fond memories of Mad Tracks, and absolutely love racing games in general. Toy car racing games are a rather rare niche, especially outside of top-down games in the vein of Micro Machines, but even then, this fails to stand out. I obtained it in a bundle with many other cheap indie racing titles. I switched vehicles and noticed that the one I picked, the WRC4, bizarrely steered itself around the track for some reason. After that and a rehashed mission type with mines added where it turns out all the AI immediately steered into mines and blew themselves up, only for me to hit one and launch ahead faster and win, I gave up. Not terrible, but there are so many great racing games crying out for your attention, time, and wallet that this just isn't worth it. As it is, I'll likely just leave it running for cards and not bother booting it again.

Super Toy Cars misses on too many fundamental things for me to give a recommendation. With its lack of polish and game content, it may have needed a little more time in development before a final release.

Now, Super Toy Cars did have some good things about it. I did like the graphic style and the environments are good enough to give you the “toy car” feeling they were going for.

After placing down a power-up, you get a little mini-cam that shows you people getting hit by it. That is a really cool feature. The placement and size of it does hinder your ability to see around left turns.

Steam workshop and a level editor will breathe a little bit of longevity and replay value into the game as you can make and download content.

Moving along to the bad. As I’m writing this part, I feel like I’m making a bug report for the developer. Not the type of thing you want to do with a finished game.

Seemingly repetitive levels – The game has 12 levels, but are only from 4 different locations. So the scenery will only noticeably change 4 times. Otherwise, the different tracks at the same location blend together and use the same assets.

Repetitive game modes – There are a small handful of game modes, but come off as extremely repetitive.

Car upgrades didn’t seem to matter. Fully upgrading a car made it seem no different in a race from a stock one.

The game will reset your car back on the track if it detects you’re backwards or have smashed into something, etc. However, this feature is too sensitive and activated when I could have easily fixed myself. It also activated once while I was mid-air going over a jump.

You vehicles transmission seems to hunt for a gear after a jump and will also sound like it’s keeping too high of a gear at multiple points. Especially going uphill.

When cancelling a multiplayer session search, I had to kill the game from the taskbar as it wouldn’t go back to the menu.

Certain areas, especially around half-pipe sections, there can be little invisible points that your car catches on and makes it stop immediately.

The audio throughout the game crackles at time when a lot of things are going on. Also, there is a strange soft static noise even when nothing is playing. It goes away when I mute my speakers.

For having online multiplayer and local split-screen, I couldn’t picture me and my friends having fun playing this. Which is probably the biggest negative by far.

Pros
+60fps
+Fun environments and graphic style
+Steam workshop and level editor

Cons
+Repetitive levels
+Repetitive game modes
+Car upgrades didn’t seem to matter
+Car reset nanny is too sensitive
+Transmission hunts for a gear and stays in a high gear too much
+Crackling audio issues
+Low volume static noise present at all times

3/10 Poor

Super Short game with 8 episodes which all feature the same game modes / maps but have a slightly faster enemie, im glad the game only offers around 2 hours of gameplay because it became very boring very fast espically with the same songs playing again and again, its like a demo track for some band, definatly needed more uniqueness over the course of the game but i did love the toy styled maps and cars.