Cartoon Network Racing borrows heavily from the cart racing formula presented in games like Mario Kart. You take a group of 8 racers around four different courses within different Cup Championships. Once you complete and win the first cup, you unlock the second, along with four new tracks, and so on. When I say that the game borrows heavily from Mario Kart, I mean HEAVILY. You use on road arrows for speed boosts, you run into random item blocks for power ups, hell, there’s even a Rainbow Road knock off in space.

Unfortunately what the title doesn’t borrow from the Mario Kart series is a sense of fun. The racers control well enough, but if you happen to slam into another cart or any kind of object/wall, you’ll come to a complete halt. It can get pretty annoying in stages that use an indoor environment with tight corners and even tighter passages, where you’ll find yourself bumping into other characters constantly, and thus stopping each time you do it.

The game doesn’t look to hot either. The developers have gone for a cel-shaded approach that comes off as a lazy design choice than anything else. The environments are incredibly bland, especially outdoors where they’ll consist of large patches of desert sand or big green blobs that represent hills. The racers don’t fare any better, and while they’re perfectly recognizable, details don’t stand out at all.

Each track borrows a familiar tune from a particular show, which makes sense, but the carts all sound the same. Each character will blurt out a small phrase here and there, but it becomes more annoying with each time you hear it.

There’s a huge slew of unlockables in the game. Additional racers, mini games, and even episodes of a few cartoons. The extras are all pretty expensive though, they use coins that you gain by winning individual races and overall championships, and you can also earn coins hidden about on each track. However, most of the unlockable materials require a pretty ridiculous amount of coins, so you’ll end up having to replay a lot of the tracks just to unlock things, and since the game is pretty tedious at best and the rewards are mostly mediocre, its not going to be something that you’ll want to do.

Given a bit more time and ingenuity, Cartoon Network Racing could have been quite a bit better than a standard Mario Kart clone. Unfortunately, it barely stacks up to the other clones out there, and doesn’t hold a candle to the racer it tries so hard to emulate. I can’t even recommend this one to the kiddies, and anyone above the age of 12 should definitely stay away from this one.