A new racing challenger approaches! (Disney Speedstorm in Review)

I don't think I'm making a bold statement when I say that Mario Kart is the front of the pack of Kart Racing games genre. It has been pretty comfortable for a long time in that position, but could that have changed with the most recent competitor in the arena? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that it's not going to be a fun time! Disney has been making some moves in the gaming world recently with new games like Disney Dreamlight Valley, Tron Identity, and a few years ago with Disney Infinity, but today, we're talking about Disney Speedstorm. I'm happy to be activating my unique skill of writing to take you through this new game, highlighting all the good and not-so-good along the way!

Racing through the Movies!

    Disney Speedstorm is a game that clearly has a lot of love for the Disney movies of the past, while also performing as a well put together drift-heavy kart racer. The character list is packed with all-stars from the start, and is one of the many aspects of the game that will be better in time. It started with only characters from Mickey and Friends, Jungle Book, Hercules, Mulan, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Beauty and the Beast. We have now added a few more movies, including some from Monsters Inc., Toy Story, and Figment from "Journey into Imagination with Figment" from EPCOT! With the few characters also came very few tracks so far. Again, this is going to be fixed eventually, but here, we really only have about seven or eight tracks with a bunch of different variants. Shockingly, these variants do go a long way to remix the races, even whenever some of them are just amount to putting the starting line in a different place. While there are only a few actual tracks, at least the soundtracks here are very different depending on what movie the track is based on. On the Hercules track, you may hear a remixed version of "The Gospel Truth," complete with the vocals, which is a fun touch, or you may hear a track heavily inspired by "Go the Distance," but isn't taken directly from the movie. All of the different properties are well represented in the music, and the characters do have a lot of love put into them. For instance, at the beginning of the race, Belle sometimes does her little dance from the "Be Our Guest" scene inside her car, which is just a cute touch. There are a lot of neat moments of characters from different voice lines like these, but again, there aren't very many of the characters. These are all issues that can be remedied with the fact that this game is technically still in early access, and therefore still having a fairly limited amount of content that will ramp up over time.  I hope we'll see a lot more variety of tracks and characters as the game continues on. 

    The different race types add a bit of variety, all of them being shown off in the story mode-esque world tour. With this game being reliant on a "Live Service" mindset, these Season Tours are tied to whatever season is going on right now, with the current one being themed around Toy Story. This means there are a lot of races on the Andy's Room tracks, lots of tokens and upgrade materials for the Toy Story characters, but not much help for other racers for the most part. It does give a lot of content to play, assuming you have the proper resources to level your characters up enough to win, as it's very hard to win with a character even two levels under the recommended. I'll get back to the microtransactions and currencies later, but for now, I'll just talk about the different modes. Within Season Tour mode, there is a wide variety of race types, with my favorites definitely being the classic races, which just allow you to put your skills to the test against computers, there are single item races, that make every power-up you grab the exact same, Elimination Races, where you have to stay away from the back of the pack or else be eliminated after a certain number of hits, and then some other challenge races such as one where you have to traverse a foggy track, or something of the like. There's also an online mode, which I haven't played much just because I'm not a big fan of online random matchmaking and I don't have any other friends who have played it, but as far as I can tell, the servers seem to hold up well, very minimal lag or rubber-banding, and it seemed to go pretty well. I should say that I've only played it on PS5, so I can't speak for the Switch version, which I would imagine to not move as smoothly, but I could be wrong. There's also a local mode to play with friends on one system in split screen, and the great thing about that mode is that you don't even have to worry about unlocking the characters with tokens or leveling them up, because they're all just available in that mode, similar to how Multiversus was at first. It's a lot of fun to race these courses with friends, though again, this mode makes it even more obvious that there are very few maps to race on so far. There are also lots of limited time events constantly going which allow you to compete for rarer items, or every now and then, those are the only way to unlock a character, such was the case with Figment, who I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, there is one little thing that holds the game back in a big way.

Curse of the Battle Pass System

    In Live Service games right now, there is a mechanic known as the Battle Pass. For every season, they'll have one of these as a way to encourage more people to play for longer. There are typically two tiers, as there are here. There's the Free Pass and the Golden Pass, with the free one being, well, free, and the golden one being something you have to pay for. Ironically, I can't even tell you how much one season of the golden pass is, because you can only pay for it with a gold token. I'm not sure how much a gold token is worth in real money, but I got two of them when I bought the game, and I assume you can pay for them somehow, but I can't find any information on the Playstation store about it. I actually just tried to go to the page where you can maybe buy some, but I accidentally just used one of the tokens that I had (which I didn't know I had until then). Has it set in that the currency system may be a little convoluted? Other than the Golden Pass token, there are blue tokens, which you can buy some things from the store, mostly cosmetics, but occasionally there are new characters that you can buy tokens for. There are also season tokens, which allow you to buy items during whatever particular season the game is in, and at the end of the season, they're all converted into the blue currency, which is good for any time. Multiplayer tokens are the last currency that I'm aware of at the time, and obviously you get those from playing multiplayer or certain events that rely on a leaderboard. Even though there are only three forms of currency, the racers themselves have some currency aspects to them.

    To unlock a new character, you need to get 10 Character Tokens, but that only unlocks the weakest form of that character (one star). All of them have their own unique abilitiy, as well as making certain items stronger based on what kind of character they are/how many stars they have, and to get another star, you need a lot more tokens. I think you need 20 on top of the original 10 to unlock a character's skill, which is the main perk of two stars, then to get three, it's another 35 tokens, and after that is 50 to get 4 stars. On top of all this leveling up, there's also a crew mechanic, so you can get side characters to power up your racer in some way, and you need 5 tokens to unlock them with 15 more to get them to tier 2, and so the great circle of leveling and monetization begins anew. I won't even get into the upgrade tokens that you use to level up your characters, but it's a similarly confusing and frustrating amount of tedium. You can imagine how this adds up very quickly, and it's worrisome to say the least when you're monetizing the game in this way with so many different types of currency. On the plus side, I'm not sure that there's any way to buy any form of currency right now other than just playing the game or buying a more expensive bundle, such as the "Deluxe" or "Ultimate" editions. I just bought the "Standard," and I've already unlocked most of the characters, but there's a lot of confusion here, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that once this game goes free to play, it'll make a lot of money from confused kids who don't even really understand what it is that they're paying for a lot of times.

    All in all, this game is a fun time, they did a pretty good job with the racing aspects, though it obviously doesn't hold a candle to the best games in the genre like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed. The confusing monetization system really reminds me of a mobile game that's trying to squeeze money out of a young or potentially addicted fanbase. That makes sense, given the pedigree of Gameloft, the makers of this game, which is mostly in mobile titles. It's worth mentioning that they also developed Disney Dreamlight Valley, which also has some questionable monetization to it, but I would argue that Disney Speedstorm is a lot worse about these practices. I do hope that some of this will be removed eventually, and I think it would be a much better game if they just made it a normal Kart Racer. There's a lot to love here, especially for a huge Disney fan like myself. The fact that they put Figment in as a Figment in as a driver and the Dapper Dans as some of his potential crew mates makes me feel like there's a lot of love in this game. The soundtrack is really pretty great, not many soundtracks will have a dubstep version of "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan, that's all I'm saying. With all this in mind, I'm really torn on whether I can really recommend this game in good conscience. I like it a lot personally, because I don't plan on spending any money on it besides what I did just to buy the standard edition when it went on sale. I can easily see it becoming a monstrous spending habit for someone more likely to get addicted to microtransactions. It honestly feels like Mario Kart Tour a bit, which is not a great comparison because at least that game is free to pick up, where as the full price for Speedstorm is 30 dollars at the time of this writing. I hope it will go free to play soon, but I don't think they've announced anything concrete about that yet. P.S. The universe has again played a joke on me because as soon as I posted this, they announced when it's leaving early access and going free-to play. The game will enter its normal operation of Free-to-Play on September 28, 2023. All progress made prior to that will be kept and carried over to the finished version of the game, but they're still continuing to add to the game for some time, as far as I can tell.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends. It makes me sad that I have to be less than positive here on this game, but it is a lot of fun, it's just muddled by some convoluted monetization issues. I hope they'll make it better sometime in the future, but I hope you'll let me know what you think about this title, whether you like it or not! Have you played any good Kart Racers lately? Let me know! I'm always happy for recommendations of new games in genres that I enjoy. I hope you'll all have a great week, and thanks again for all the support! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, your Self-Proclaimed racing enthusiast, and I'll talk to you again soon!