Disney Speedstorm should be the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed of Disney Kart racers…

It honestly seems like kart racing games with Disney characters should be more of a thing, but really the last time we had racing games starring Disney’s recognizable roster of animated stars was over 20 years ago. Kart racers in general are kinda few and far between, most likely because Mario Kart has been the reigning champ for nearly its entire run, and even if you don’t have a Nintendo system competitors often come up short.

But being the first game of its type starring Disney characters in decades, I really hope Disney Speedstorm is a rich representation of the rich history of Disney and its characters. I mentioned Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed in the title of this post because not only is that a really good game, arguably the best kart racer not bearing the Mario Kart name in existence, but it’s also a celebration of Sega with some extremely obscure and deep pulls that longtime fans really loved and appreciated (and it’s really a shame Sega basically threw that all away with future series entries for a much worse game with Sonic Team Racing).

Disney Speedstorm at first glance seems at least not to be some generic racer with Disney characters that might as well be interchangeable skins on bland tracks. You can see IP representation and differences in the characters in the trailer (and though this trailer is for Nintendo Switch the game is coming to PC, Xbox, and PlayStation as well). But the fact that it is Gameloft, which is definitely primarily known for mobile games and is a free-to-play title obviously raises concerns about what we are getting here. There’s been no mention of how the game will be monetized (seasons? racers? tracks? all of the above and more?) and if players spending little to no money will have a hampered experience because of it.

And granted, this is definitely making some assumptions that we just have no way of knowing if they are true or not yet, but we know what free-to-play games, in general, tend to be like and especially from developers that strongly lean towards mobile platforms. Honestly, ideally maybe there would either be a yearly sub fee where you get all the new content or an option to pay for packs of stuff you want, but that’s not usually the mobile method of monetization.

Since the initial trailer, we haven’t seen much of Disney Speedstorm, which is due out at some vague date this Summer, but that’s also often how these games are, they often get announced and then released with not a whole ton of fanfare beforehand. At the end of the day, I’m really hoping it will be a great representation of Disney, its long history, and its pretty massive library of IP (maybe even get some Marvel and Star Wars characters in there eventually for some reason they really don’t seem keen on mixing those together in video game form) without trying to gouge us too badly to get a full experience. We’ll see if that’s the case when Disney Speedstorm hits later this Summer.

That’s it for today, but the whole reason I was thinking about Disney Speedstorm is that there is, in fact, another racer featuring Disney characters coming out this week, Warped Kart Racers for Apple Arcade, which I will definitely be checking out and hope to have my thoughts on here this weekend so see ya real soon!