Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway

I'll be straight with you: nobody on the shooter desk should be reviewing a Nickelodeon kart racer. But here I am, and after a few hours with Slime Speedway I can at least tell you it plays better than the box art implies. The core loop is drift-boost-item, recognizable to anyone who has touched Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing. Steering is the first thing you'll notice that isn't right: it reads floaty, with almost no sense of traction through tight corners. You adapt, but it means the skill ceiling on track routing feels lower than it should for a game asking you to master slime shortcuts and midair trick combos (called Slime Stunts) off jumps. What Slime Speedway gets genuinely right is content volume. Thirty-six tracks spread across Slime Scramble Grand Prix cups, Free Race, Time Trial, a Challenge mode, and an Arena mode means you won't burn through everything in a sitting. The Challenge mode deserves a mention because it locks you into specific characters and asks you to hit objectives mid-race, things like nailing a set number of item hits or threading slime shortcut paths cleanly. That structure gives solo players an actual reason to engage with the full roster rather than one-tricking SpongeBob for the entire runtime. Kart parts all carry individual speed and handling stats, so there is a light build-crafting loop under the surface too. The pit crew system is the most interesting mechanical layer. Before each race you slot in up to three supporting characters from a pool of 90 unlockables, each contributing either a passive perk or an active ability you trigger by filling a slime meter on track. Crew combinations like Mr. Krabs' slime-magnet passive stacked with a defensive active from a TMNT character create small but meaningful strategic decisions, the kind of thing that rewards replays without punishing newcomers who ignore it entirely. Mid-race Madness events, where the game suddenly asks everyone to knock down bowling pins or dodge oversized gnomes before returning to normal racing, add chaos that works fine in local split-screen but can feel arbitrary when you're trying to push a clean lap in solo play. The online side is where the shooter part of my brain went quiet fast. Online multiplayer supports up to 12 players, but at launch reviewers struggled to find lobbies, and the Steam player count has never been meaningful enough to guarantee populated sessions. Split-screen for up to four players locally is where this game lives and breathes. The rubber-banding logic is also weaker than genre contemporaries: once a skilled player or determined AI racer opens a gap, catchup items are too infrequent to close it. That makes multiplayer sessions with mixed skill groups more punishing than they should be for a family-oriented title. Voice acting, new to this entry, adds genuine personality the previous two games badly lacked, with characters from SpongeBob, Avatar, TMNT, Hey Arnold, and Invader Zim delivering lines that feel written for the game rather than pulled from archives. PC and Xbox performance is generally fine at native resolution targets, though some platform versions at launch drew harsh criticism for frame pacing problems that made the slime-slide shortcut sections, where a swooping camera already obscures your jump timing, nearly unplayable. Patch history for this title is thin, so manage expectations if you are on a version that shipped poorly. At its honest best, Slime Speedway is a competent, content-rich kart racer that earns its place as a couch co-op option for nostalgic 90s-kid households or parents gaming with younger children. It is not going to threaten your ranked racing habits, and the online population makes treating it as a competitive outlet a non-starter. Fred, Scout Team