There are a couple of games called Duck Race but the one I picked up on deep discount in the current End of Year PSN sale is Duck Race on PS5. I thought it’d be a throwaway laugh that I could sink an hour or so into and not really think much more of it but in some ways, I under estimated the fun that Duck Race provides.
This is a one button racer. You don’t steer because the ducks are all racing down a water chute to a well at the end. Sadly, this is a single player only experience and that is a great shame because Duck Race shares a lot of DNA with slot car racing games. The dozens of tracks are all full of hairpins, roundabouts and ramps to press your button on to jump for a boost and you need to manage your speed carefully. Go too fast and you’ll fly off the track and need to start again. Go to slow and the other ducks will escape up the chute and you won’t catch them to win. Winning is all that counts as that opens the next race, earns you XP and that levels up your duck and unlocks more costumes. Your duck doesn’t upgrade as such either which puts everything refreshingly down to skill.
There is a simplistic beauty to the game design but there are also some dirty tactics you can deploy. You can slow yourself down by ramming other ducks off the water and this comes in handy when hitting tight corners as its faster to bounce off others than slow down to turn. This becomes a legitimate tactics across the game to catch the leader sometimes. Many corners also have rainbow ramps that give you fever mode – a boost to a higher top speed. The flipside is that sometimes those boosts mean you are too fast for the next corner so you have to balance risk and rewards. Also placed in levels are gaps to jump over, flipping wooden planks to block your path like a windmill in crazy golf and frogs that pop out of the water to push ducks off. Water also sometimes pours off the track like a waterfall altering the ultimate racing line and thus the speed you take into those corners.
If that sounds much more in depth than you’d expect a game called Duck Race to be, you’d be right – and its for this reason alone I found myself over 120 levels in still enjoying myself in the moment to moment gameplay. Every 10 levels bring a boss but these started to highlight a critical game flaw that turned some of my fun into feeling much cheaper than it initially did. You see bosses need to be hit three times to be beaten before you reach the finish line and well to exit the level. I started to notice that the bosses slow to an almost standstill to allow you to get each hit in and that took away any challenge the bosses provided. Then I started to notice the AI ducks in the regular races do the same thing, just not quite as severe. Sometimes this causes a last corner divebomb, push and win steal but the game often dangles this slowdown carrot a bit too early. This means if you aren’t already in the lead with a few corners to go, you’ll suddenly see all the ducks ahead of you dithering and whilst this doesn’t guarantee you each win, I started to feel a bit sour about being handed victories I didn’t fully earn. The longer you play, the more this tires you out. Its as if the developers made a game that required a bit too much skill to win at times and in fear of offending a younger audience added this skill dip to balance the game out. I wasn’t a fan.
That aside, Duck Race only has one music track that gets old after an hour and only one mode to play. I could see how a panning out camera could have worked well to allow local multiplayer or perhaps split screen could have worked well in this game too. Sadly, the single player focus and the hand-it-over AI means Duck Race doesn’t fully deliver on what is quite a fun and very playable foundation. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’d definitely welcome a sequel with added local multiplayer and perhaps a track editor using fragments of track like a slot car track builder.
(Also, some trophies are broken just in case you are completionists)
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