Remember that infamous ET game from in the 80’s? The one that has 100,000 copies buried in a landfill? Well, Wacky Racers: Crash and Dash belongs right next to it.

I’ve literally never played a worse game in my life. I made it through 12 agonizing minutes, and I only played that long because I had to do a review. Seriously, just don’t buy this game.

Everything is wrong with Wacky Racers. The gameplay is cued towards 5-year olds but the license is from a decades old cartoon. The graphics are inferior to the PS2 game from a few years back and the controls don’t work. And, even if they did, the camera is so bad that you can’t even tell who your character is. I literally did better when I set the controller down and just watched the game play. 

When you see a game called Wacky Racers you might expect some, you know, wacky races. You might  expect racing game play. You might even settle for any type of reasonable game play.  You don’t get those here. Instead, of the tired and true driving over the shoulder steering that most racing games use, Wacky Racers uses a sideview that makes controlling your character near impossible. Worse yet, the sideways view is so far out that you can’t tell which character is which. Instead, you end up randomly smashing buttons trying to figure out where the hell you are.

The Wii remote feature is beyond useless, not to mention a recipe for repetitive stress injury. Who the hell thought that making you shake the controller up and down so that it looks, to the casual viewer, like you’re masturbating, was a good idea?

I know that licensed games don’t have the best reputation, but this is ridiculous. Wacky Racers is completely and totally UNPLAYABLE. It’s nauseating, poorly designed and filled with stupid mini-games.

None of the charm of the original series is even present. Instead of jokes and visual gags we get 3-second loops of one or two sounds for each player. Backing this is the incredibly annoying voice over narration for the game. You would think that the developers would spring for more than one race worth of commentary. But you would be wrong.

This game is so aggressively awful it’s almost like an Andy Kaufman joke. But Kaufman and dead, and the only people laughing at this will be Warner Brothers Interactive.

CONCLUSION