Paw Patrol Rescue Wheels: Championship – Review

Ah, licensed kart racers. From Nickelodeon to Gigantosaurus and even the Smurfs, there have been many attempts to convince unwitting parents that “yes, this is Mario Kart but with your kid’s favorite Saturday morning cartoon show.” Admittedly, not every one of these games is terrible, with some even being decent. Ultimately, though, Nintendo has set the gold standard. The vast majority of kart racers phone in the actual gameplay and instead bank on brand recognition to hawk their games. Which brings us to Paw Patrol Rescue Wheels: Championship, Outright Games’ sixth and latest addition to the Paw Patrol video game library on the Switch. We’ll admit that we know nothing about Paw Patrol -we’re not exactly the target audience- but we do know what a decent kart racer looks like. Can Rescue Wheels: Championship cross the finish line, or is it in need of rescue itself?

Story

Keeping things simple, Rescue Wheels: Championship’s story sees the puppies of the titular Paw Patrol -Chase, Skye, Marshall, Rubble, Zuma, Rocky, and Roxi- participate in a racing championship around Adventure Bay. However, the nefarious Boomer & Frank and evil mayor Humdinger are in the championship as well, and if they win, this spells doom for our puppy friends. We don’t doubt that there is some deep political commentary in play here, having the mayor be evil, but you’d imagine that he’d find other ways to deal with dogs that work as police officers or firemen. Wouldn’t he be their boss? Maybe we need to watch the actual show to understand the deeper meaning, as there isn’t a whole lot of exposition in the game.

Graphics

With a very successful cartoon show, rendered in CGI no less, there is a wealth of source material for Rescue Wheels: Championship to draw from. To the game’s credit, the characters look like they should based on the reference material. With bright colors and cheerful character design, it’s not surprising how much appeal the series -and by extension, the game- has with the four-to-six-year-old crowd. One gripe we did have with Rescue Wheels: Championship is that the game can’t keep a decent resolution in handheld mode on the Switch 2 -as you can see in the screenshots accompanying this review. Everything is blurry there, although the game looks fine when docked.

Sound

We’re usually proponents of having voice acting present in video games, but Rescue Wheels: Championship is a rare exception. Not only does the kart racer genre not really need voice work, but the voice clips used here are repeated ad nauseam. If we hear “Chase is on the case!” one more time…. Apart from the needlessly repetitive voice work, Rescue Wheels: Championship’s racing action is accompanied by seemingly generic music. We’re not sure if this is the music from the show, but the tunes don’t exactly get your adrenaline flowing. Rounding things out are stock sound effects, which we suspect are simply recycled from Outright Games’ other kart racers.

Gameplay

What’s the most crucial element of a kart racer? Is it the track layouts? The vehicles and their drivers? The items that you use to gain an advantage over your opponents? All of those are important, but we’d argue that it all starts with having good controls. Unfortunately, Rescue Wheels: Championship falters here. We’ve played plenty of kart racers in the past, and we can safely say that this game has the worst control scheme of all of them. The culprit is the so-called Stunt Meter, a bar that fills up as you perform, well, stunts. Those stunts don’t require precise timing –this is a game for toddlers after all– but simply require you to push the A button. Your racer does a little trick, and the meter fills up a little. Once your meter is full, your kart gains a massive boost. Simple enough, so what’s the problem? Well, the issue is twofold.

First of all, you need to hold down the B button to make your kart go forward, but it’s very uncomfortable to hold down B while tapping the A button simultaneously. There are two ways to mitigate this: either turn on auto-drive, which is probably the best option for the Rescue Wheels: Championship’s target audience, but also turns the game into an incredibly easy snoozefest, or remap the A-button if you have a controller that supports this. The other flaw with the way the control scheme is built around the stunt meter is that the gauge actually goes down when you’re not performing stunts. You can’t just build up the meter and then grab your boost at an opportune time. It’s a needlessly convoluted system that sucks all of the enjoyment out of playing, and if the only in-game workaround is to have the game play itself for you, then that’s just bad game design, period. We put things to the test and had the game auto-drive and auto-stunt and won our race without even pushing any buttons. Sure, a four-year-old isn’t going to care that they’re simply holding a controller and pretending that they’re actually playing, but if that’s your aim, then Mario Kart World has you covered with auto-drive and auto-steering options, and that one is actually a good game.

With the game’s control scheme missing the mark, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Rescue Wheels: Championship feels barebones elsewhere too. The game feels light on content overall, with a limited number of racetracks and modes. The limited customisation of the vehicles and the “villain” racers are locked behind winning races. We’d assume that you’d need to beat the championship multiple times with the different characters to unlock everything, but the control scheme was frustrating enough that we didn’t bother to find out. The game has three different difficulty levels, but these match the target audience, and even at the highest difficulty, the karts were zooming around at a snail’s pace. Perhaps the most offensive thing about Rescue Wheels: Championship isn’t how shoddy the game itself is though, but the eye-watering RRP of €39.99. Outright Games clearly hopes that parents will buy this purely because of their kids wanting the latest Paw Patrol game, but both the IP and those kids deserve better.

Conclusion

We were willing to give Rescue Wheels: Championship the benefit of the doubt. After all, we didn’t mind Dino Kart, which was also an Outright Games release. Strip away the Paw Patrol IP, however, and you’re left with what is probably the worst kart racer we’ve ever had the displeasure of playing. Everything about Rescue Wheels: Championship feels like a rushed cash grab, a way to capitalize on a popular IP right in time for the holiday season. Assuming you’re reading this because you’re considering buying this one for your kids: don’t do it. Get your kids a good kart racer, like Mario Kart or Sonic Racing instead. In the long run, they’ll get more mileage out of those.

SebastiaanRaats

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