Paw Patroller Toys

There are licensed games with no meaning and licensed games that make a lot. While Multiversus is surprisingly good, we’re not convinced we Required Shaggy Shaking Batman. What about a karting event that features the four-wheeled PAW Patrol This makes a lot more sense. It might be a money-making machine (haha!)), but it’s one that has a right to exist. 

It is easy to see why the Xbox is a console for playing video games. while not short on karting games, isn’t particularly well stocked with karting games made for younger players. Race with RyanHowever, it is a poor and lazy attempt. Grand Prix PAW Patrol takes aim at the bullseye and doesn’t get far from it. 

It’s time to sing its praises. The auto-drive mode of PAW Patrol’s Grand Prix is available. This is a lifesaver if you have a three-year old girl who loves watching their family play together and insists she be part. It drives forward for her, and occasionally course-corrects so that she doesn’t see Adventure Bay from behind a crash-barrier. It’s not new – Mario Kart 8 pioneered it – but so few games adopt it. Bravo to PAW Patrol: Grand Prix for including it here.

All the PAW Patrol karting experiences your little ones would want are available. The main cast of pups are here, plus Ryder, and it doesn’t take long to unlock Everest, Tracker and Rex. There might have been room for Liberty from the latest movie, or some of the peripheral characters (Chickaletta only gets to sound the starting bell, natch), but it’s the heavy hitters, plus a few more, all in their famed, recognisable vehicles.

They are all sung in English by the UK cast. You can watch PAW Patrol on YouTube. You’ll quickly see that there are also regional voices. Mayor Humdinger doesn’t sound the right one in the US version. This video shows that these voices were correctly recorded. Even though they are only in brief interstitial cuts, it gives PAW Patrol Grand Prix some authenticity.

Best of all, PAW Patrol: Grand Prix is four-player, and it’s couch co-op to boot. As long as you have four game pads and the equal number of willing pups, you can all play together, and you’re not sacrificing much as you do. It’s the bare minimum for a karting game, but you’d be surprised how many let this hurdle twonk them in the face.

Chase is the core of the team, but Chase is less reliable than the rest. There aren’t many ways to play PAW Patrol: Grand Prix, for example. The Adventure Mode, which has a very limited range of options, is closest to a grand prize in campaign or Mario Kart style. Here, you can play seventeen tracks in a row, but you can only play them single-player, and they’re not broken up into smaller chunks. You can return to your save at any point, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to break these up into manageable bites in some form?

There are also quick races that you can use to choose the track or character you want (again bizarre: what discerning PAW Patrol Fans would do). wouldn’t want to choose their character), and finally – and thankfully – a Custom Race, where you get to choose the track AND character, as well as play multiplayer (but only locally, which makes sense considering the age rating). 

Twelve tracks can be selected with the option to change them to day or night. We would prefer to use a mirror mode. These 12 tracks are divided into four tracks. ‘themes’It was spread across several similar layouts. Jungle, Adventure Bay, snow and a kind of beachy flavour are all you get here, and it’s not really enough. They can improve the feeling of repetition, despite being flat tracks that are often difficult for younger players. These seventeen tracks will make Adventure Mode feel very familiar if you play them in succession. It’s a bit like watching the episodes in adult mode.

There are shortcuts to make the tracks more enjoyable, even though they can be tedious. However, the controls work well. The cars handle well, and they handle even better if you work out that RT is a power-slide with a boost as payoff; the game doesn’t actually tell you that it’s there. There’s a neat dual-weapon system too, which echoes Outright Games’ other racer, Fast & Furious – Spy Racers Rise from Sh1ft3r. You can collect Mario Kart-like weapons, such as boosts, jams and tornadoes that circle your kart, but you can also accumulate pup treats which will eventually unlock your dog’s signature attack.

Ryder has a shield to stop attacks (a typically non-committal attack from ol’ goody two shoes), while Skye has a flying helicopter boost and Tracker uses his toolkit to grapple the person in front. Each pup has a character-appropriate ability, and while they do range in quality (Tracker’s only works if someone is in front, which isn’t great in first place), they are varied and give the pups some individuality.

That said, there is a blue shell in PAW Patrol: Grand Prix, and it sucks as much as it does in that Mario game that we’ve referenced too much already. It’s a tractor beam that slows you down to a crawl which, as it turns out, is more infuriating than being hit. Moving at 2kph doesn’t feel good, unsurprisingly.

It’s not surprising that there’s a lot more rubber-banding in PAW Patrol: Grand Prix. We found that the three difficulty settings were too difficult as seasoned karting enthusiasts. Marshall or another dog, no matter what our choice, would be there to help us if we were struck by the blue shell. Sorry tractor beam. PAW Patrol: Grand Prix is definitely prone to a little didn’t-deserve-to-lose-itis, which is fine, if not great, if you want little’ uns to have a chance of winning, but makes it unsatisfying if you are chasing the perfect Adventure Mode for an achievement.

Nothing in the arsenal of weapons is particularly outstanding (a confetti bomb is a cute articulation of the screen-smothering weapon, but that’s about the height of it), but we have to keep rewiring ourselves: this is a kid’s game, and kids are nowhere near as discerning. Looking at the beaming face of our three-year old as she clears the finish line in second place with Skye, well, that’s kind of priceless, innit?

Grand Prix by PAW Patrol is the ideal choice for younger players who are looking to jump into a Marshall-powered fire engine. It can handle four players at once; it’s all the right pups with all the right voices. It has an automatic drive function, which is the best part. The analogue stick is all that your little one will need. This is not to be taken for granted: it’s incredibly rare.

For everyone else? Perhaps we shouldn’t care. There’s enough here to make playing four-player anything but a chore, and so what if it doesn’t stand up to an adult’s single-player scrutiny? It wasn’t made for us. No.

Take the testimony of two PAW Patrol fans in our house – PAW Patrol: Grand Prix is on a roll.

You can buy PAW Patrol Grand Prix at the Xbox Store