Why are there so many joke reviews? It's very hard to get a true informed opinion on this game.

[Ecchi Games]

Was curious to pick this up, I like kart racers but half the reviews claim it's a broken buggy mess that doesn't even start, the other half are joke reviews calling it the best game that ever existed. I cannot find any good reviews that break the game down objectively in a way that's valuable for a potential consumer.

[LiquidZulu]

If you wanna get a feel for the game I recommend checking out the speedrun community. Id also advise that you wait for the game to go on sale, it often goes down to a few quid

[Hồ Chí Minh Gaming]

An honest opinion from someone who's played the game for a fat minute:

This is a mostly alright Mario Kart (Crash Team Racing?) clone. It does the Garfield brand proud, but that's a low bar to hit. The game feels a bit empty once you've gone through all the cups and played a few challenges. I think this game still has value though, it's fun to play in multiplayer (if you get lucky and it works without issue) with your friends, and has some decent meme value. I'll agree with my mans HankSuplecks in saying that the speedrun community is generally the most interesting thing this game has to offer. It's competitive, friendly, and not totally tech-exhausted quite yet.

Specifically speaking on graphics, this game has them. The cartoon style can be a bit of an eyesore sometimes but overall it's just meh. Not like you should buy this game for the graphics.

Controls feel a bit *hmmmm* sometimes. I think they're okay, definitely above average when it comes to Mario Kart clones but there are still frustrating moments.

The AI isn't awful, but the game gives them such a huge advantage that they're hardly worth measuring yourself against. On that matter, the whole catch-up mechanic that makes Mario Kart fun until the end is nonexistent for human players. Also look forward to bunching up and immediately falling to sixth when you get knocked.

The soundtrack is one of the better parts of the game. The songs really do fit the mood, a soulless hellscape somewhere in the mind of a Jim Davis in catharsis after killing 5 people with an ax. Some bops, some oofs, but this game actually doesn't have an awful soundtrack.

Multiplayer (with friends) is surprisingly fun. There's something about playing a kart game with your friends where you're Garfield characters in a Garfield world that makes this a fun experience. It's also the buggiest part of the game (see if you can figure out how to play time trials in multiplayer :)) so be ready to absorb the frustration of not being able to connect. Not very many people are active in the multiplayer these days, maybe school but it was never too active to begin with, check steam charts to see what i mean.

For replay value, there is some but your options are limited. There are 4 cups, each with 4 levels. There's three types of levels: city, country, and desert. They don't blend together too much, but no level particularly stands out from any other level. There are quite a few items to
collect for each character, and different ways to acquire them. The star system, despite the fact that the game makes no effort to describe or even mention, is a good motivator for the 100%-minded. Casual players may find their enjoyment drop off after their first playthrough. Like I said, without getting the unofficial community-made asterisk-and-also-nonparallels-developed shameless-plug modloader replay value is limited.

Also of note, this game runs very poorly on the main branch (unless you're a cool cat and have the GKML Unity 4.3.4 patch), so I'd recommend switching to the multi_test branch.

To sum it up, this game is perfectly average. It's worth $10 if you're a meme god or a racing pro wanting something different. Otherwise it's a toss-up, wait for a sale, play the game for a bit, and refund before 2 hours if it's not your deal. This has been a ProJared review

[Jiggy007]

Well I recently got this game and it resembles Crazy Chicken Kart and Mario Kart. You are racing, can collect weapons on the way to use them on enemies or to place them on the ground. If you ever played Crazy Chicken Kart you will know what I mean. The graphic is nice, I lke the cartoon style and you can unlock items, new cars and stuff by collecting coins during a race, So you can spend these coins for new characters, cars and extra Items. Since Crazy Chicken kart has no Ingame Shop where you can upgrade stuff, it was interesting for me and I think its a really nice idea. And of course it is a game you cant play like 5h at a time. It is more like the usual occassional race game for now and then.

But.. now the big BUT is coming.. :
I really have no idea why there are alot of positive reviews and comments for this game. I have a pretty good computer (Lets say I have no problems with Running Rise of Tomb Raider on Medium settings). My computer should be able to handle Garfield Kart, right?

Unfortunately it cant handle it. The graphics are totally simple and even very old computer should be able to handle it lol. But the truth is, on certain locations and race-intros the game is lagging hard. I tried everything but I gave up, its not really working for me.
Beside this, if you start a grand prix tournament, you will have do 4 races. But after the first race, you cant click the continue button. You are stuck on the score-board screen and need to force quit with the task manager. So to make it short: the optimization is the worse and the game is pc-unfriendly with these bugs. Despite of the nice graphics and the good gamplay (good like.. as you can expect from a usual cartoon racing game) I can not enjoy the game because the bugs are too heavy and destroy the game fun (unfortunately).

I could not find any fix so far. So unless these bugs are fixed, I would not recommend you to buy this game. And since the game is from 2013, I highly doubt they will ever fix it. I mean, the devs could at least give an instruction why these bugs cold occur (maybe graphic card settings overriding game settings or whatever, although i turned off my graphic card settings to use the original game settings, still didnt work though).


EDIT: Okay I found out something interesting. I will not take back what I said about the buggs above. But there is something I found out now and I will mention it: Garfield Kart has a Beta version. If you change the game properties to the beta multi player branch in your steam library, then it will download the beta Multiplayer Version. It is basically the same as the Original game but they added Online and Local Multiplayer to it
And it looks like it has no laggs and buggs anymore! (Yup I am glad myself). With some further research I found out the lags and bugs occured because the developers used a bad version of Unity for the original game and that vUnity version was known for performance issues. So in the Multiplayer Beta branch they used another Unity Version to avoid all the buggs.

[bdlio]

... or grab it from Fanatical for 0.44 for the next ~30 hours