Beach Buggy Racing is a kart racer where a bunch of crazy drivers and their dune buggies compete in a tropical setting.  It’s available to download on nearly all current game consoles, mobile, and PC, but reviewed here on the Switch.

If you’ve played a kart racer before, you’ll know what you’re getting into here.  First pick a driver, and each one has a special ability you can activate once per race.  You’ll unlock more drivers as you complete challenges.  Same thing with the beach buggies, which is what you choose next.  The tracks are all tropical themed, centered around beaches and volcanoes and such.  Like other kart racers, on the tracks you can pick up weapons that’ll help you gain the lead.  Some you can pick up include boosts, shields, rockets, and more.

There are many gameplay modes, but the main campaign mode has you complete various challenges.  Most of the time it’s just a race, but sometimes you have to beat a certain time on the track or challenge another racer to a one on one match.  Depending on how well you do, you can earn stars and coins.  The more stars you have, the more levels you can unlock.  Spend your coins to upgrade each car’s attributes, like speed, handling, etc.  One neat thing you can do while upgrading cars is change their color and patterns, too.

Other game modes include a split screen two player local match, time trials, cup challenges with consecutive races, and a daily challenge.  Although the game is decent, I really can’t imagine any Switch owner wanting to play this over Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which is a much better game.  Unless of course you’re on a very limited budget or played MK8 to death. And after the first set of challenges, the difficulty ramps way up, forcing you to really grind for upgrades.  I think only die-hard kart racer fans will enjoy this.

Kid Factor:

Beach Buggy Racing is rated E for Everyone with ESRB descriptors of Mild Fantasy Violence and Use of Tobacco.  I don’t remember seeing any of the characters smoking in the game, and the only violence is sending silly weapons out to opponents who just tumble around when hit.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may find the races too difficult and frustrating fairly quickly.

Tags: Game Reviews