Recent reviews by SketchNote

Fun for the whole family :^)

One of the only games I can have fun while losing most of the time

The first thing that made me think so much less of this game was the way turbo boosts get charged. In the last game, each racer, depending on their turbo stats, would charge turbo in a different span of time and recieve a different amount of speed for it. But even for the characters that take longer than the others to charge turbo, it charges within a decent margin.
For example, for the duration of a level 1 charge, you can drift to charge another turbo boost just before or just after the first level 1 turbo boost ends.
But in this ♥♥♥♥ing game, every character seems to take the same amount of time to charge a turbo boost, and they changed it so it takes so much ♥♥♥♥ing longer to charge it. it takes about 10 or so seconds to charge a level 3 boost, and it isnt as easy as it was in the previous game either. When you drift in a direction for a certain period of time in this game, your vehicle starts to cave in on the drift and turn itself into whatever direction you're drifting in, even if your pointing your control stick the opposite way so you can spread the drift wider to keep it going. So to keep your boost charge, before you hit a wall because the drifting in this game sucks, you have to let the drift go and immediatly drift in the opposite direction without banging into the road walls or obstacles, just to even attempt a lv 3 turbo charge. So with turbo being something harder to obtain, you have to rely more on weapons to ♥♥♥♥ up your opponents gain and the speed boosts on the course itself.

The great thing about games like Mario Kart 8 and the original all stars racing is that you can chain your turbos nicely if you know what you can get away with in a course. And it doesnt take much time to get to lv 3 charge. When you know how to string your turbos through multiple turns, you gain a huge advantage. Even if the AI Rubberband in the original All Stars Racing, you can keep a good 5-10 second lead. But with this game, you dont get that, its much more chaotic and random with opponents catching up to you and hitting you with homing weapons just so you lose your lead. Then you get to use your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ turbo to try to catch up while using either homing weapons or using well placed snowball or rocket skillshots to attempt to catch up.

And then there's the boat and air segments that suck and dont work, trying to make this into a overdone version of Diddy Kong Racing. The Boat segments make my controls seems sluggish like im playing a bad version of Wave Race. And Navigating the air leaves much to be desired. I much prefer the way mario kart 8 handles air segemts with a glider over a small span of the course. While some courses in ASRT have entire laps in the air, leaving you to essentially have dog fights in the air because using the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ drifting to catch up while in the air is just aweful. And I have never been a fan of Dog fighting games like War Thunder.


The things I can say that are actually good about the game are the amount of characters, the mods for them, and the way stunts work. The original game had a nice cast of characters (with a guest appearance from Banjo & Kazooie in the xbox version only unfortunatly). But this game has a lot of Guest characters for the pc version and in general. And while some of them are a bit weird like General Winter and Footbal Manager, I love the fact that Wreck-it Ralph and 3 members of TF2 are playable.
The maps are also visually appealing and the atmosphere of the courses are great. And while I miss challenge mode, world tour isnt that bad either.

TL;DR
Turbo in ASR Transformed is utter ♥♥♥♥ing garbage aswell as the boat and air segments. And while the maps and aesthetic of the game are better looking than the original ASR, the original ASR plays much better and you feel in control of what you're actually doing.
While this game has multiplayer and the original All stars doesnt, almost no one plays online so its not really worth it for that reason. Buy the original All Stars Racing for a better "Kart Racing" experience.

I seriously reccomend that anyone who has Half-Life 2 get this game. It's basically a way to play Half-Life 2 in multiplayer mode. You can play through the campaign, or you can play on custom servers. It really is fun to play with friends!