Garfield Kart - Furious Racing

I'll be straight with you: I came in fully expecting to write two snarky paragraphs and move on. What actually happened was forty minutes of local split-screen with three friends, a heated argument about whether Nermal or Odie has better cornering stats, and someone rage-quitting after getting hit by a magic wand that teleported them to last place. That is, somehow, a recommendation of sorts. Furious Racing is a remake of the 2013 original, built around the same cast of eight characters from The Garfield Show universe. You pick from Garfield, Odie, Jon, Nermal, Arlene, Liz, Harry, and Squeak, each with slightly different stats, and then pair them with a kart and a cosmetic hat that can actually nudge your item pool during races. The core loop is straightforward arcade kart racing across 16 circuits with three speed classes, 50cc through 150cc, and three modes: Grand Prix, Single Race, and Time Trial. Items you grab from track boxes include a pillow, a pie with an auto-aiming variant, a spring for jumping shortcuts, and the chaos-causing magic wand that straight-up swaps your position with another racer. On paper it sounds like a perfectly serviceable budget kart game. In practice, the handling is the game's biggest problem. Karts drift a little too hard into corners, and at boosting speeds you will clip walls you could have sworn you avoided. The kart physics sit somewhere between floaty and twitchy depending on speed class, and 150cc specifically is a test of patience rather than skill. The item balance leans heavily luck-based at higher speeds, which is either a feature or a bug depending on your group. For a casual Saturday night session with friends who are not kart-racing veterans, that chaos is genuinely funny. For anyone trying to compete seriously, one bad item string at 150cc can erase a race lead with nothing you can do about it. The AI at higher difficulties also rubberbands aggressively, which critics have pointed out is a consistent frustration. The track design across the 16 circuits, from Palerock Lake to Pastacosi Factory, is thematically varied but rarely clever or inspired. Most feel like clean, competent layouts with a new backdrop rather than inventive courses built around the Garfield licence. The split-screen mode supports up to four players locally, and this is genuinely where the game finds its footing. You each need a controller, keyboard play is awkward, but four people on a couch trading pie hits and spring shortcuts is exactly as messy and fun as budget kart chaos should be. Online supports up to eight players, though finding populated lobbies has historically been unreliable. For the couch crowd, this is the sell. For solo players grinding Grand Prix cups, content runs thin fast, with the whole 100% completion achievable in under eight hours according to the community. Here is the honest summary: critics have been harsh, the professional press largely panned it, and those are not wrong opinions on the game's technical merits. But Steam's 88% positive rating across nearly fifteen thousand reviews tells a different story, and a lot of that goodwill is meme energy from Garfield's second life as an internet icon. The real answer is somewhere in the middle. This is a below-average kart racer that is above-average fun when you treat it like a party game at the right price point, not a serious Mario Kart rival. If your group is the type that enjoys a deliberately imperfect chaos machine with cartoon cats, the couch co-op magic is real. If you want a tight, polished solo kart experience, look elsewhere.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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