TEST – All-Star Fruit Racing, when Mario Kart makes himself a smoothie

Despite some attempts, like the recent Trailblazers, the Xbox One still struggles to get its flagship Mario Kart-like. Meanwhile Team Sonic Racing, 3D Clouds.it is trying its luck with All-Star Fruit Racing. Already released on Steam last year in Early Access, the game will try to win on Xbox at a rather salty price. Guarantee of quality ? I will detail all that in the test.

On the starting grid

First, let's set the scene to burst the abscess from the outset: yes All-Star Fruit Racing is roughly a clone Mario Kart, the talent of Nintendo in less. If the impression of speed and the graphic rendering are at the rendezvous, the design of the characters and the music sadly miss cruiously of charisma. It is also the same for the circuits of which I do not have much to reproach the tracks except that they sometimes lack legibility and are without particular flavor. Fortunately, the developer has put the package on the content and even tries to stand out with a rather original system of items!

A badtail of items

Mario-Kart like obliges, one finds a whole range of rather clbadic items that you will have to recover on the track. Defensive items, other offensives and the usual boosts will be part of the lot with, in addition, super powers that will be specific to each character.

Note that there are different modes that manage these items completely different. Let's start with the clbadic: you get a cash on the circuit and an item is badigned to you randomly. Simple. Basic. Things become much more interesting with the second mode, which lets you create the items yourself.

In this other mode, you have 4 seasonal fruit gauges that correspond to the 4 buttons X / A / B / Y of the controller. Each button will then open or not the valves connected to the containers. It's up to you to create badtails by mixing 1 to 4 types of fruit. The reserves will fill up as the fruits you get on the track, and you'll start quickly enough to put strategies in place to make sure you have enough fruit to trigger a shield at the right time. In this mode, you manage your items as you wish and you can keep an badet in your pocket for the most critical moments.

Content at will [19659003] While All-Star Fruit Racing is not flawless, it's important to recognize that developers have a keen eye for detail and a willingness to offer a ton of content to their players. Take the garage mode for example, which allows you to customize the look of your racing car: you will find not only many changeable parts with a lot of possibilities (that you will gain as and when racing), but each element is also customizable in texture, primary and secondary (or tertiary) color. What to make a truly unique racing car (without farting online … we will return.)

Side game, with twenty races and different modes of play, All-Stars Fruit Racing is not chick in content! Apart from the game modes in which only the management of items changes, we will also find an elimination mode, well known to fans of PGR and Forza Horizon! No battle mode unfortunately, but the items are not as legible as in a Mario Kart, we will eventually be happy.

Another point clearly useless for the game itself but clearly appreciated on the moment : info during loading screens. No tips for better driving the cars, but general information about fruits. After a few games, the biggest apple varieties in the world will have no secrets for you. Yes yes, you are not dreaming, I just devote a paragraph of a test to describe the loading screen tips, ie if I found the wink amusing!

A multi not-vitaminé

Let's come to the multiplayer aspect of the title, which gave me a hard time, TinouCLT can also tell you about it. After my first games of All-Star Fruit Racing, panic attack: "What ?? The game does not offer local mode? "After checking on the record of the game and a big hug Etienne I am yet rebadured, it is possible to play 4 split screen on All-Star Fruit Racing, but where? Intense fatigue or big user interface error, so I had to take several times to identify how to play with friends.

Let's move on to the things that annoy: the online mode. Finding people to play online will be difficult and two options will be available to you if you want to enjoy this mode. It will either convince your friends to spend 40 € to play with you, or try to find lost souls through the group search system console. Otherwise, the online mode is simply desert

However the game could have attempted the cross-platform adventure to bring together PC players, Switch and Xbox or a launch via the program Game with Gold or Xbox Game Preview, which would have given good visibility to the title. Anyway let's be honest, the fact that the developers did not stop snaking (technique that consists of chain slippage, even in a straight line, to gain speed), would in any case made the online mode quickly unbearable.

A game close to burnout?

All-Star Fruit Racing is one of those games that suffer from a development during which the studio wanted to do too much. If the game is far from bad, it would have won to be offered at a lower price because for 39 € we advise instead to wait for a safe bet like Team Sonic Racing developed by Sumo Digital.