This is also part 3 of a series on Rayman mobile games, starting here and continued here. You can see more information and screenshots here and here. The Gameloft composer who made the original soundtrack has put it on his soundcloud (minus one track) here. And you can download the game yourself here; getting it properly and legally is probably impossible at this point. Of the many builds and configurations, for my emulator the best one was the Samsung SGH-F400 version in the 240x320 category, although it was actually 240x297 for some reason. Most others didn’t render the “alpha channel” properly on the sprites so there were pink squares everywhere. However this version did crash on pausing or failing a race, so it’s a tradeoff.
Now about the game. It’s kind of a more primitive Mario Kart 64 clone, or a more advanced Super Mario Kart. You have to take the limitations of Java phones into account for this game; while the music is nice and jaunty, there are no sound effects. The graphics are a mix of basic, Star Fox-esque polygon objects and scaled sprites with some drastic pop-in. The track often slopes up and down and there are frequent obstacles, boosts, or jumps to keep it interesting, along with fun stuff on the sidelines to look at. The items are your pretty standard Mario Kart set. Projectile, boost, invincibilty, hit-first-place item, hit-all-others item, and a character-specific item with various effects (such as dropping baby Globoxes or the Teensie warping into first place).
As I often do, I liked the mix of 2D and 3D graphics, as the developers come up against the limits of the hardware. Speaking of which, as a mobile game the controls have trouble responding to more than one input at a time. Therefore we have karts automatically accelerating at all times, and directional power slide buttons for sharper turns (which I never found the need to use) as well as normal steering. Driving the inside line is rewarded with a boost, so powersliding didn’t seem necessary, at least on the difficulty I chose.
Each of the eight tracks has four missions: an easy race, a harder race, a time trial (where you have to finish each lap ahead of a countdown), and a 1 on 1 coin collecting race. It’s good having a few more options, and winning each event rewards you Lums which count towards unlocks of more characters, tracks, and karts. So for the first two thirds you’re always working towards something.
So it’s a fairly standard kart racer, constrained by the phone platform it’s running on. So why is it remarkable? Well for one you have a course with both Rayman 1’s Moskitoes as obstacles and Raving Rabbids-style cows on the sideline. As I’ve said about previous games, especially the GBA Rayman games, it’s so cool pulling from different instalments in the series as a celebration of Rayman. The characters include Razorbeard, a Hoodlum (I like to think it’s Andre), and a Rabbid in the same game, which is unique to Rayman Kart. RRR is obviously being promoted as the new release, with some of the Rabbids’ technological terrors, the elephant demons, and zombie and scuba diving Rabbids hanging around but combine that with the courses being set in environments out of R1, 2, and 3 such as a swamp, the fire sanctuary, the Dream Forest, etc. and you have the most enjoyable aspect of the game to me. And it’s an excellent way to wrap up a playthrough of the Rayman series. Wait, I still have to play that soccer game? Oh, man.
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