Disney Speedstorm: Grinding to a halt

Out in early access this week, Disney Speedstorm is the first proper racing game in a while to feature a wide swath of Disney characters in a genre that seems a natural fit to the characters, kart racing. It’s from Developer Gameloft which is known for primarily mobile efforts but seems to be making a big push into the home console arena between this and Disney Dreamlight Valley.

And while Gameloft is a mobile developer known for making games with pretty ridiculous pay-to-win mechanics and microtransactions, that’s sort of expected in the mobile space. Disney Dreamlight Valley gave me hope that they would be taking a different approach to console, but Disney Speedstorm smacks of all the worst mobile tropes.

This is a shame because there’s the making of a solid racer in Disney Speedstorm. The tracks are all takes on Disney movies or themes and look pretty cool. Your mileage on the music may vary as it is entirely club/dance remixes of well-known Disney standards, I would’ve liked to have the option to switch to standard versions of the classics, but some of these remixes are pretty cool.

The racing itself is fairly solid as you zoom around the tracks and when leveled up enough (which doesn’t take that long generally) racers get their own specialized attacks that all seem pretty useful in their own ways with my personal favorite being Donald Duck’s which is literally just a swarm of angry red fists taking out any racers nearby.

But while the standard racing is pretty good, there is a “survival” mode where the idea is to stay out of last place as long as possible while drones with lasers shoot the racer in last place at regular intervals until their shields are gone and eliminated. This mode can be insanely frustrating as the AI racers just seem to magically catch up overtake you and right when the intervals are about to happen.

So if the racing is solid and the game looks great and has a lot of Disney fanservice, what’s the problem? Well, let’s start with the lack of variety. While there are plenty of racers, there are only a handful of tracks, and every race is at most two laps, for some, it’s even one and there’s no option to change this. There are also no difficulty options which for a game clearly aimed primarily at the younger set is just weird.

Then there’s the lack of modes, there’s a single-player mode that mostly serves as a way to get you familiar with how the game works that consists of a number of races through six chapters, seasonal events that are the same setup to earn you loot and gain collection levels, daily events and online multi-player. That’s a pretty ok standard amount of options, but no extended single-player modes is a bummer.

This would be far less of an issue if Disney Speedstorm wasn’t mired down in not just its grinding, but being overwhelmed in various currencies. It should be noted to be fair you cannot spend extra money in Disney Speedstorm right now and buying more expensive versions just allows you to unlock a certain number of racers faster but the ability to spend money to buy currencies or loot boxes will be coming at some point.

So to start, your racer has not only a basic level but also a star level that of course have different requirements to level up. Beyond the first few levels, every racer has items specific to them you have to collect through racing to level up which would be fine if there were specific ways to earn those but lots of times it's a crap shoot what you can even earn or buy through the shop.

The stuff you need might literally not be available any other way than random loot boxes and that also pertains to merely unlocking racers. I literally am stuck on the single-player mode because I need to unlock Hercules and I don’t have enough Hercules chips to unlock Hercules and there’s nothing I can do to specifically earn Hercules chips, I need to earn enough coins to buy a loot box and hope there are Hercules chips in there and if there is it’s always just one chip so I’ll need to do that a bunch more times just to unlock this racer. And beyond like your first four or five racers that’s what it’s like for all of them.

Sound exhausting yet? Because that’s just the beginning of the currencies ranging from chips for your pit crew that grants you various bonuses that again are specific to each racer there isn’t like just one type of pit crew chip you can use. This isn’t counting general coins, racing coins, multi-player coins, and more. Even for any free-to-play mobile game, this is an insane and mind-boggling amount of currencies that is impossible to keep track of, and right now, this is a product you are paying for, early access or not. Frankly, in early access for a game that is going to be free-to-play in probably a year or so, they should be showering you with the currencies you need I am literally paying you to beta-test your game for you.

It should also be noted that “levels” don’t seem to grant you much of an edge. If my racer is level 13 and racing in a race that is recommended for level 3 (and you do see stats go up when you level) I should easily dominate said race and that just doesn’t happen. So “levels” are just unnecessary gating.

Ultimately in Disney Speedstorm there are the bones of a good racing game because the mechanics are solid, the music is fun and there is plenty of Disney fan service, but it’s completely mired in mind-boggling numerous currencies that are crapshoots to even earn what you would want. Granted, the whole point of early access to hopefully balance these things out and maybe, just maybe Disney Speedstorm will get there but right now, as a product you pay for I couldn’t honestly recommend it to anyone and I’m not sure that will change by the time it becomes a free-to-play product, it might in fact get worse.

As Disney Speedstorm is in early access I probably will be checking in on it periodically and see if there are any big improvements, though, for comparison, DisneyDreamlight Valley is fundamentally the same game it was when it launched, just with more content added, so I don’t expect some massive improvements to the already broken currency structure here. My next week is a little up in the air but we are only about a week away from the launch of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor so look for my thoughts on that most likely in early May when I’ll have had some time to dig into it. See ya real soon!