Garfield Kart - Furious Racing

A great racer for kids! As is standard in karting games, you pick up boosts and weapons to foil your opponents or glean an advantage. Lasagna gives you a speed boost, while pies and springs can be used as obstacles on the track to trip up the competition. You can even drift. Perfect to play as a family, but harder than Garfield Kart.

Six years after Garfield Kart, the sequel has landed in the form of Garfield Kart: Furious Racing.

Furious Racing joins the long lineage of karting games. Characters (often cartoon characters) strap into their madcap karts and race along fantastical tracks, hurling items in a race that stays heated all the way to the finish line. It's the same formula that Nintendo has been using since the early 1990s, and if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Lasagna, hamburgers, ice creams, and pizzas, the different landscapes you'll be racing through all have something to do with Garfield's favourite pastime: eating. The tracks aren't too complicated, serving up a nice mix of environments, shortcuts, and secret passages.

Garfield Kart – Furious Racing features three different race modes ( Grand Prix, Single Race, Time Trial) across a total of 16 tracks. Before you start your engines, you'll have to choose from a selection of eight different characters and several models of kart, each with different stats. The game also lets you customise your character, as well as the accessories for your kart that you can unlock as you win more races.

Designed for younger gamers, the game is super easy to pick up and play out on the track, but the handling keeps things interesting enough for grownups. The karts are nicely responsive to the controls and it's not that easy to end up off the track, which is great news given that many karting games are too challenging for gamers aged under 10. This one is suitable for ages 7+.

Our favourite part? The trap and bonus systems. As you collect sweets along the track, random obstacles will appear in front of your opponents, causing them to veer off course, or you might earn a nice speed boost.

We liked the focus on drifting, which was missing from the first Garfield Kart.

Our advice? Don't bother sticking close to your competitors to ride in their slipstream: it can be extremely dangerous!

In short, this is an unpretentious kart racer that the whole family will enjoy.