Konami Krazy Racers

"A fun but short Mario-Kart clone."

These days, each time you go to a store theres should be a new Mario-Kart clone on the shelves. There in many themes: Crash, Star Wars, Woody Wood Pecker, and now they've inflicted the terror upon Konamis games. One thing I like about this game is that it has some familiar faces, theres Goemon, the Ninja from Metal Gear Solid, and Dracula from Castlevania, and some others which I dont reconize.

Graphics - 9
Incredible. It cant touch Iridion 3d however, but its awfully close. If you ever seen how Super Mario Kart looked on the SNES, this looks like that except you get to have the full screen. And it moves more fluidly.

Gameplay - 8
Pretty fun but will get monotonous after a while. There arent many courses (compared to Mario Kart that is) and there isnt that much difference between them. The hazards can be pretty cheap, like in one level (the baseball stadium) base balls fly everywhere and they only seem to hit you, although they hit the computers ever once in a while. Same with the Magna Castle (there answer the Bowsers stage in Mario Kart) the fireballs hit you lots of times while the computers few times. But these are minor complaints cuz with practice they can be avoidable, but often they cost you the race. There are 3 difficulty modes, so that adds a decent amount of replayability. Theres cool multiplayer modes, and you can even play them with/against the computer and a friend at the same time. If you happen to know 3-4 other people with a gba and this game, then I would give this category a 10. But as a single player experiance (which most people will play as), the gameplay of this game is good, but could be better.

Replay Value - 6
This game will last for a while, but after a while it'll get just plain boring. If you have friends that have this game, then it might actually be the best game out there for the gba (out of the launch titles) but it'll be pretty rare to know 4 people with the same game (with the exeption of pokemon with some poeple). The replay value is not the best, not the worst, but Konami could have done better.

Buy/Rent - If you liked Mario-Kart, or a hardcore Castlevania fan, go and get this game as soon as possible.

Overall - 8
Definantly worth checking out, if not a flat out purchase.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/18/01, Updated 06/18/01