Race With Ryan

I cover shooters for a living, so when Race With Ryan landed on my desk I approached it the only fair way: as someone who has genuinely played every Mario Kart entry and has strong opinions on item balance. The short version is that this is a budget kart racer built around a YouTube licence, and nearly every decision made in development reflects that reality. The mechanical bones are passable. There is a hop-to-drift system that hands out turbo boosts generously enough that even a young child will feel rewarded for hitting the button at roughly the right time. Three difficulty tiers (Easy, Medium, Hard) are on offer across Career Mode and Quick Race, and an optional auto-acceleration toggle means a toddler can steer without worrying about the gas. That is a genuinely thoughtful accessibility feature. Beyond that, though, the combat layer is hollow. Mystery Eggs drop power-ups like burger shields, sticky slime, and paper planes, but none of them carry any real punch. There is no satisfying equivalent of a well-timed item throw, no tension in the item economy, no read-the-room positioning play. You pick up an egg, you press fire, something mildly inconvenient happens to a nearby AI kart. That is the ceiling. The track count is the biggest structural problem. Six locations with reverse variants technically doubles the number, but the repetition sets in fast even for the target demographic. The environments themselves, covering settings like a toy shop, a wild west town, a pirate island, and a haunted house, are bright and read clearly on screen. Some vehicle choices cause real visibility problems, though: at least one kart features a raised sail that cuts off the road ahead, which is a straight-up design flaw regardless of the audience age. The roster lists 21 racers, but that figure is inflated because it counts multiple versions of the same character in different karts as separate entries. In practice you are picking from a handful of character types. No stat differences between them either, so selection is purely cosmetic. Audio is rough. Voice clips from Ryan play constantly and were clearly recorded at home rather than in a studio, landing with noticeable mic feedback throughout. Adults sitting in the room will reach for the mute button. Kids who are fans of the channel may find it charming for the first session. Steam user reviews sit at Mixed, with roughly 57 percent positive across a small sample, and that split tracks with what cross-platform critics found: fine for a dedicated fan aged four to eight, thin for anyone else. There is no online multiplayer at all, only local split-screen for up to four players, which actually works well enough as a couch option for younger siblings. If you are buying this for a child who watches Ryan's World religiously, it will hold their attention for a few sessions and the control assists make it genuinely approachable for very young players. If you are a parent hoping to share something with them that also holds your interest for more than twenty minutes, the honest answer is that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe exists, costs roughly the same, and has thirty-plus years of refined kart design behind it. Race With Ryan is not broken, it is just thin, and thinness has a price.

Fred · Scout Team

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