Tossing £2 Into A Well Will Give You More Satisfaction
My daughters tell me that Brainrot is, and I quote, “so 2025”. But that unc-ness didn’t stop them from pestering me to buy Brainrot Kart, which is about 50% a Mario Kart clone and 50% a…
6-7! SQUID GAME! SONION! BRR BRR PATAPIM!
Erm, yeah, the other 50% of Brainrot Kart is someone screaming phrases and memes into your ear like you’ve entered a bootcamp to become a terminally online teenager. It’s fascinating to watch: the two halves of Brainrot Kart absolutely HATE each other, and they alternate in trying to get your attention. The memes don’t want you to race, and the racing stuff largely ignores the memes. It’s not too distant from sensory torture.
At What Point Does Brainrot Kart Get Sued For All The IP Inclusions?
Let me try to paint a picture: you’ve picked your favourite brainrot (skibidi, tung tung tung sahur, the 6-7 kid) from the selection of racers, and you’re on the grid. The green light flashes and you’re stuck, stationary, because Brainrot Kart has a weird acceleration bug where it won’t register if you pressed the button before the green-light flashed.
After that hiccup, you’re hurtling along the ‘Endless Edging’ track and get hit by your first meme. It covers half of the screen, before getting interrupted by another one that covers the top of the screen. They’re so quickfire that you don’t get to the punchline, if there even was one. Spider-men, dancing babies, memes you know, memes you don’t – they all appear momentarily on the screen like you’re seeing your life flash before your eyes, but your life was spent skimming 4chan.
What’s so odd about all this isn’t the constant sensory overload, it’s that you can’t tell whether the memes and gifs are the result of a weapon, or they’re just part of the whole ambience. I genuinely don’t know if I’ve been hit by a weapon in Brainrot Kart. Everything certainly acts like a weapon, and the weapon in question is the squid from Mario Kart. The game screen is hijacked by a sequence of partial brainrots, and you’re leaning around, trying to see where you’re going.
The Worst Weapons In A Karting Game, Bar None
The whole ‘did somebody hit me?’ question has a partner in the form of ‘did I hit someone else?’. You can slide into items on the tracks in Brainrot Kart, which will hand you a weapon on the top of the screen. Use them, and 90% of the time nothing will happen. They disappear into the aether, theoretically dry-humping someone else’s screen. But there’s no feedback. If I did actually send John Cena over to another character’s game window, then I certainly don’t get any joy from it.
Somewhere underneath all the brainrot is a kart-racing game, and it’s like Super Mario Kart on the SNES never came out. The tracks would all be rejected from that game for being too flat, too uninspired. Levels like Ohio Oval and Endless Edging are just straights and bowls, while Based Bay is a rip off of a famous Mario Kart track. Other levels are effective to look at but awkward to navigate, like The Backrooms. There’s no track that does anything remotely interesting, which is fair enough as you wouldn’t be able to see them beneath the videos of bad haircuts anyway.
There’s no weight or drift to the cars, so you’re mostly just navigating a cluster of pixels around a series of loops. It’s not too different from those games where you have to move a metal loop around a twisted electric wire without touching it. It’s certainly not a racing game.
At Least You Have The Tracks To Yourself
It would be difficult to win if the AI wasn’t an absolute shambles. There are three challenge settings here – Dog Water, Moggable and Locked In – and they’d give Wolverine’s motorcycle sections a run for their money as it’s almost impossible to lose to them. ‘Locked In’ is an appropriate name for the AI’s hardest setting, as the racers like to get irredeemably stuck in corners and bounce like flies on a window. If you want a laugh, just stop and watch them. Or you can just race, and invariably lap them every time.
Multiplayer should improve the experience, but it’s here that I find myself in a kind of gordian knot. I keep thinking that I have found a way to play against other people, but then something falters and it doesn’t happen. The Xbox Store Page states that couch multiplayer is possible, but there’s no option for it in the game, and plugging in extra pads does nothing. You can Host a game, but that inexplicably boots you to a screen to purchase Game Pass, as if that was a requirement (and the server-code system didn’t work for us anyway). There’s the option to Join a server in progress, but there was never one open or working.
Crying Into The Void On Your Own
All that you can do is boot back to the main menu and dejectedly opt for Offline. Only solo play is possible here, with up to 7 bots and – I suppose – a surprisingly generous-for-the-price 11 tracks. While battle modes are available (but not actually available, since you can’t play them) in multiplayer, they’re not available here. There is no option for tournaments, no queuing system for tracks (after every race you get unceremoniously ‘yeeted’ to the main menu, and all of the settings return to their default setting), and no unlocks, time-trials, highscores or achievements beyond ‘get hit by X weapon!’. Even those achievements are a write-off because the AI couldn’t hit you for toffee.
I know Brainrot Kart is just £1.99, but as a baseline for my games I like them to work, do what their Xbox Store page promises, and offer something beyond the 40-year old game that they’re copying. It’d be appropriate to give Brainrot Kart a score of .6 or a .7, but I guess we’ll have to stick to the ol’ 0.5.
Important Links
Brainrot Kart Is A Cheap – And Ridiculous – Xbox Racer – https://www.thexboxhub.com/brainrot-kart-is-a-cheap-and-ridiculous-xbox-racer/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/brainrot-kart/9N7XPXKBKFP5
