“Garfield Kart 2 – All You Can Drift” is a competent attempt at recreating the success of the “Mario Kart” series, but it’s not anything particularly special. While it has a few stand-out features, there are several factors that just barely hold it back from really competing with its inspirations.

A free online playtest of the game was available on PC via Steam that ran from Aug. 21 to 25, which allowed playtesters to try out two race tracks with three characters, Garfield, Nermal and Liz. It’s a pretty good little appetizer for the game, giving you just a taste of what it has to offer without going too in-depth, but that depth, if it exists, is sorely lacking from the experience as it stands.

The gameplay is not particularly impressive. Over the years, there has been no shortage of “Mario Kart clones” trying to replicate the success of the series without really understanding what makes it great, that being rich and unique gameplay mechanics separating each entry from its previous and following iterations. Unfortunately it seems “GK2” is not much different.

“GK2” seems to take most of its game feel from “Mario Kart Wii” and “Mario Kart 8,” but it lacks both the hectic item balance and anti-gravity mechanics that define those two games, instead sitting quietly in a “Mario Kart 64” level of gameplay depth. The two courses on display in the playtest, while visually beautiful due to the game’s cartoony, cel-shaded art style, are quite flat, short and generic.

That really is a running theme in this game. While on the surface things can look crispy and inviting like a freshly-baked lasagna, biting just a little deeper just reveals the chef gave up on cooking anything beneath the top layer and let the cheese inside get cold– with the game released less than a month later, on Sept. 10, it may already have been too late to send it back to the kitchen to fix its issues.

The game seems content to reheat the leftovers of everything that came before it.

For instance, the 3D models of the playable characters and karts are very well-designed, but the characters themselves have very basic dialogue and animations, all item pickups were basic re-skins of recurring “Mario Kart” items and the actual process of driving doesn’t try to stand out in any way from its contemporaries. 

The simple fact that characters like Garfield and Liz, whose personalities are exclusively portrayed through their body language and dialogue by nature of originating from a comic strip, are given zero dialogue beyond basic cheers and groans and generic, uninteresting animations makes the game feel much cheaper than it really should.

There were several issues with the basic functionality of the game, as well. While many of the online-related issues, such as players frequently disconnecting and the existence of a thirty-plus second “warm-up” waiting period before each race are excusable with them being part of the playtest specifically created to find and fix these kinds of issues, others cut deeper.

For one, the game had some difficulty reading my controller inputs: I specifically could not turn left with the joystick, forcing me to use the D-pad to steer. While enabling Steam Input fixed this issue, doing so made the X and Y buttons perform each other’s functions simultaneously in-game and the controller button glyphs were messed up unless I was currently pressing any button.

Other minor issues persist, like being able to drive through the underside of the race course if you fall off and although only three characters were available to players, the rest could still show up as computer-controlled racers, begging the question of why they were even made unavailable in the first place if they’re already complete and functional.

It’s clear that the developers of this game have put their blood, sweat, tears, cooking oil and motor oil into making it great, but as it stands the Chuck E. Cheese Ford Fiesta that is “Garfield Kart 2” languishes in mediocrity compared to the Uncle Tony’s Ferraris of the genre like “Mario Kart World.” 

It manages, at least, to not have the $500 entry fee of a Switch 2 and perhaps will still satisfy a group of friends looking for something cheap and functional on a Friday night.

“Garfield Kart 2” is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox.