Coffin Dodgers

My honest take: I bought this for a Friday evening couch session with three friends, and for that specific use case it punched above its weight. Coffin Dodgers is a kart racer built around one gloriously stupid premise - seven elderly residents of Sunny Pines retirement village challenging the Grim Reaper to a mobility scooter championship to keep their souls. Characters include Rudolf 'The Red Horn' Hoffman, 'Marvellous' Martha Goldberg, and Lucy 'Legs' Hernandez, among others, each with their own backstory, though in practice they all handle identically since you share the same upgradeable scooter regardless of who you pick. That's the first sign the concept runs slightly deeper than the execution. The racing itself sits comfortably in Mario Kart territory without ever threatening it. You run four-lap races across 13 tracks spread over four themed zones - village, farm, graveyard, and more - picking up weapons and gadgets mid-race to beat rivals off their scooters. The melee stick swipe is genuinely funny the first time you watch a pensioner get ragdolled across the tarmac. Ranged weapons include homing rockets and a defibrillator that stuns nearby drivers in an area burst, which is a nice thematic touch. The Garage lets you spend race earnings on speed, acceleration, handling, and weapon upgrades, and also on cosmetic paint jobs for your scooter. One honest warning here: once your scooter is fully upgraded, the AI difficulty collapses, and the story mode - which you can clear in well under two hours - stops feeling like a challenge at all. The Grim Reaper himself, who acts as the main obstacle, is surprisingly easy to knock around once you have a few upgrades banked. For the couch crowd, the good news is that local split-screen supports up to four players, though you will need four controllers or keyboards plugged in before launching - the game will not let you hot-join after the fact. That friction is real. Online multiplayer exists on paper, but the player base on a decade-old indie title is effectively zero, so treat it as a local-only game for planning purposes. The 'Crazy Grandad' mode, which tasks you with collecting items across an open map against a timer, sounds fun and grows stale very fast. Story mode, split-screen race, done. That's the game. On the technical side, the controls are arcade-loose and accessible to anyone who has touched a kart racer before, which makes it fine for casual players and genuinely good for mixed-skill groups. Collision detection is inconsistent - sometimes a wall bump costs you a second, sometimes it erases your entire lead. Performance issues including stutter have been reported since launch and the game is old enough that your mileage will vary depending on hardware. Graphically it looks dated even by 2015 standards. The soundtrack loops the same bouncy theme across every race until you want to mute it. None of this kills the fun in short bursts, but it does mean you are buying a session game, not a long-term racing fix. If your group wants something to run between rounds of something else at a Halloween party or a low-stakes games night, Coffin Dodgers earns its keep. If you are a solo player hunting for a meaty single-player kart experience, the two-hour story mode is going to leave you cold.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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