A kart-styled racer aimed squarely at the under-6-year-old market is a tricky proposition to get right. Most of the chaotic fun that comes from racing games requires some skill to pull off satisfying racing or special moves. You also have to work out how to help little ones get up to speed with how racing games work too – levelling the playing field to be approachable to build that skill in the first place. Enter Blaze and the Monster Machines: Axle City Racers – a colourful truck racer crammed full of assists to teach some of the basics of a racing game without penalising someone who doesn’t quite get it too much. It gets some things right, but its narrow scope means players will grow tired of the game very quickly and want to graduate to something meatier.
Let’s kick off with the positives. If you are looking for a “my first racing game” for your child – Axle City Racers has a few great features to help you. You can turn on or off two separate toggleable assistance for braking and steering. If your child can steer but not brake, the car auto-drives forward and manages the limited requirement to brake for you. Similarly, if your child hasn’t quite got their left and right distinguished, you can turn on a steering assist that numbs the steering input and course corrects the car somewhat. Instead of driving into the barriers, it simply places the car to the left or right of the road. The car can still crash but the penalty and skill level required to feel like you are driving is extremely low. Making Axle City Racers accessible to most ages is great and few other games offer the same options. The ones that do also come from 3D Clouds such as Paw Patrol or Gigantosaurus: Dino Kart. Keeping the spirit of simple gameplay, there is a single drift boost mechanic which you can chain continuously if you see fit. It is very easy to cheese the entire race by drifting and boosting but the lower difficulty means young gamers can pick up this additional skill without having to worry about double or triple drift boosts.
The other positive is the decent use of the Blaze and the Monster Machines licence. There are 8 characters, all vibrantly coloured and voiced. They handle almost identical to each other but all come with their own unique special ability. These abilities are not a positive as Blaze, the main character, has an overpowered boost that means you can trigger it quickly and often to overpower everyone else. This means choosing anyone else except Blaze puts you at a disadvantage. Some characters are just plain faster than others and that feels odd in a game like this. Nowhere is this more clear than in the welcome split-screen multiplayer. Here 2-4 players can race locally and it runs smoothly. Just watch the Blaze characters pull away from the rest in a straight line though. Hey kids – life is unfair sometimes!
Here comes the negatives. The tracks look vibrant, if a bit flat at times, but there are only 12 of them and some are barely more complex than an oval. Each track looks unique, but they drive so similarly that they blend into each other. There is also only one speed class in the game… and that is slow. This is helpful to onboard new gamers but there is a lack of progression beyond turning the auto drive assists off. Axle City Racers would feel so much more fuller and value for money with mirror and or reverse track layouts, and a couple of speed options to bring a little more chaos and challenge to the game. There are no weapons beyond the special abilities you can trigger after collecting 10 golden spanners and they are littered everywhere to collect. You can see the entire game in under an hour and since there is only time trial or split screen multiple is the only reason to return back, gamers will outgrow Axle City Racers at an alarming rate for its price.
To be fair to 3D Clouds, the game developer, they’ve improved over time. The more recent Gigantosaurus: Dino Kart is a step up from this, but oddly Race With Ryan from 2019 is better structured. It offers more of a progressive challenge and has more content for the same price (with DLC to expand it if you get the deluxe version). Sadly Race With Ryan has more technical hiccups. They all do the exact same thing and each falls into the same pitfalls though, so it is almost more important to decide on which licence your nipper likes most. Just don’t expect hours of entertainment – pick these games up on deep, deep sale.
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