Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway - Back To The Swamp With Thee!

05/08/24

Oh, Crazy Frog Racer, was I too harsh on you?

If that statement means *anything* to you, that’s just a taste of how I feel about Shrek: Swamp Park Speedway. As someone who always looks for the best, or at the very least, *something* good about them. Shrek Speedway pushed that part of me to it’s very limit. It is rare to see a game that is an outright failure in nearly every department; nigh on visually incomprehensible, frustratingly, pitifully poor to play, rage-inducing annoying, maddeningly consistent - this may very well be hyperbole, but I found nothing to like in this game.

Fun fact, this is (in a sense) one of the first games I’ve had been requested to play! A few months back, someone shot me an email requesting a Shrek game - any Shrek game - so I thought, screw it, let’s bite that bullet and get it over with. I like Shrek! Shrek is love, Shrek is life, all that shite, but seriously, I’ve always been a huge fan of the first two movies. I played the hell out of the Shrek 2 PS2 game, and ‘That is a nice boldur’ perpetually exists in my pop culture vocabulary. Full disclosure, this is all vamping in an attempt to avoiding talking about just how frightfully terrible Shrek Speedway is. It’s bad. Really, really, really bad. Don’t play this game. You don’t even need to read the rest of this review, just… just don’t play it. It’s that bad.

Shrek Speedway is a simple, to the point game, almost minimalist in nature. It’s like all the other kart racers - you’ll circle several tracks, grouped into four tracks for each of the four ‘worlds’ that makes up the entirety of the game’s content. You can collect a small - very small, only a handful - amount of power-ups to speed up past and shoot down foes. Notably, the pickups for these items can switch from white, indicating a positive item, to black, which upon pickup will place a debuff on your racer, which could invert your controls or just crash you out. Annoyingly, I don’t think the debuffs actually infect opponents; at the very least, I never once saw another racer turn into a goddamn pumpkin, so that’s lovely, isn’t it? Normally, it's nice that the game isn’t just a totally flat, 2D racer, as the game does feature some minor jumps and floor-based hazards to dodge, like holes in the track, but the big issues with this is how the game looks. The game is trying something, trying to have a little more going on than the more simplistic racers, but the graphics simply can’t keep up. The games visuals are simply so, so poor that you genuinely can’t see anything until it’s practically right on you, which lead me to a practical treasure trove of rage. Lovely.

Interestingly enough, each character has a special ability, unlocked by picking up enough horseshoe OR shrek pickups across the map; I’m not sure which one exactly, due to one of the biggest external issues I have with this game that isn’t quite it’s fault. Shrek Speedway is not a popular game, unsurprisingly, but I didn’t expect it to be so unpopular I couldn’t find *any* documentation regarding pretty much anything in this game. So, every character has a unique power, seemingly used by collecting enough of something - but I can’t work it out. If I had a manual, sure, we’d be golden (and maybe I’d have better things to say about the game), but it’s kind of a sad reality for the oft-forgotten (deservedly or not) games of yesteryear; entire mechanics, gone away, because I just can’t read what they actually do. Since I played the whole game only as Shrek, I can’t really tell what the different abilities would be - Shrek’s might be a frog that makes him speed up? Not sure.

Strangely enough, once you’ve selected your character, you can’t opt out from playing any others without starting over all your ‘story mode’ progress, since ‘story mode’ just means the game is one big tournament mode divided into four parts. It’s kind of baffling, since you’re unlocking pretty major characters like Donkey within this main mode, ones who have better stats spreads than the initial characters. Is it for balance? No Idea, but I just wanted to play as Donkey, so I’m just annoyed regardless.

Suffice to say, the racing in this game feels bad, bad, bad. There’s no real sense of acceleration or speed to be had, both due to the obscenely bad graphics, and the total lack of movement in regards to the backgrounds, along with the ‘fuzzy’ look of the game sometimes making it look like you’re not driving at all. It also doesn’t help that the CPU racers feel extremely binary in challenge - they’re either constantly hanging onto your ass, passing you seemingly effortlessly, or they put up nearly no challenge whatsoever, practically being lapped at some times. It doesn’t help that even when you aren’t getting your ass kicked by the CPU, when your focus is just on the racing, the game is just outright boring, with only a handful of tracks having shortcuts or anything to break up the monotony. It’s harder to fault the game in this department, as this is an issue that is endemic with a lot of GBA racers; seriously, this was the era of beautiful 3D racers on console platforms; it’s a lot harder to go back to these flat, more static experiences, and that goes for all of them, including the mainstays like pre-N64 Mario Kart.

The coup de grace, the proverbial nail in the racing’s coffin is the fact that the more you play this game, the more it just simply does not work. As the tracks grow narrower in the last few worlds, the racers more clustered together, more and more you find yourself caught on invisible corners, trapped on flat walls, and most enraging, bounced back into last place by a stream of opponents. I can excuse, if not remotely like the issues with course hit-detection, but the way that enemies treat you as if you’re invisible, losing no momentum in the acceleration, but to you, your racer might as well have just ran into a rock. The last race of the game actually broke me - no matter if you start in first, or you somehow catch up to the pack from last, the streets are so narrow, the CPUs so close together, they’ll just run you down, and leave you for dead. Great, quality, interactive gaming there, through and through.

I tried this level for the better part of half an hour, but I never couldn’t even touch first place, and that was when I realized this was genuinely one of the worst games I’ve ever played - made worse by the fact there’s just nothing funny about it. I simply can’t make jokes about this abysmal level of quality. Games that I’ve previously played for this website, games that I’ve called amongst the worst I’ve ever played, I can at least say they functioned. American Idol was atrocious, but it functioned. Bratz nearly put me to sleep, but at least it bloody worked. Shrek Speedway *core* mechanic - mechanic, singular - is constantly fighting against you the entire way, making the game actively worse to play. I wasn’t expecting Mario Kart - but I was expecting something. Anything!

And whilst I think I have dipped into hyperbole, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Shrek Speedway might very well be the ugliest game on the GBA. Not just ugly, this game is nearly visually incomprehensible to look at. Character sprites blur into nearly total unfamilarity, turning characters like Shrek and Donkey into a fuzz of indistinct pixels. The whole game is just a sea of pixels that, either if you’re playing on a tiny GBA screen or a laptop or ANYTHING, will hurt your eyes if you’re looking at it for too long because of just how bright, yet impossible it is to focus on anything. This even impacts on the core gameplay; the game is visually muddy, it grows extremely hard to identify threats coming up, like holes in bridges or rocks that’ll trip you up, sometimes screwing up a near-flawless run. Genuinely, if I had to say ANYTHING good about the game, is that the static backgrounds, beyond the bounds of the track, look fine. Seeing the Dragon leering beyond, or the more fairytale settings of earlier zones, they look okay. That’s it. That’s genuinely it. Can’t say that about the music, of which there feels like… three songs, max? You could’ve honestly told me the same song plays on every track, I genuinely can’t pick them apart (if they even are different). The sound effects are also kind of horrifying, which probably goes with the avant-garde horror vibe this game is going for.

And if you somehow get into the groove of this game, it won’t take you long, with a full run of the game’s sixteen tracks taking maybe a bit over an hour, hour and a half max. Sure, you could [lay through it again if you want to try out the other dozen or so characters, but, uh… don’t do that. I don’t know how you go this far into my review and would potentially think that, but please don’t.

Words can barely contain the genuine contempt I have for this game. It doesn’t matter that it’s so short, so simple - the fact that it fails on nigh on every level, leaving a genuine sense of distaste in my mouth that hasn’t been matched by anything else I’ve played thus far for the Game Boy Abyss. I don’t want to call out anyone who made this game, but I can’t imagine that they could be happy about this as a product, or a game, or *anything*. It’s the ultimate cash-grab form of shovelware, existing to sell to anyone who doesn’t know better. Can we go lower than this? Truly?

I sure hope not.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Shrek: Swamp Park Speedway! Don’t you just love finding a contender for worst game of all time? Neither do I! In any case, you can find me over on Twitter @Lemmy7003, or email me over at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests! Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time!