Race With Ryan Review

Ryan Kaji is an eight year old YouTuber who has his own toys, magazines and now a game called Race With Ryan which is out on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

It’s aimed at four to eight year olds, and features Ryan prominently - obviously. Like his videos, there are no subtitles, though you can change the menu language to a range of different languages. The available modes are: Single Player and Split Screen, and the main menu also has Settings and Extra. In Extra there is Unlockables, Intro Video and Credits, the Unlockables are the characters and maps that you unlock throughout the game.

The single player options are Fast Race, Career, Random Race and Learn to play, as I have my six year old daughter mad about Ryan's Toy Review I wanted to give Race With Ryan a go with my little helper, so first off we decided to try Learn To Play. Learn To Play gives the rundown of what we should learn: Basics, Game Control and Magic Skill. But we decided to go back and give the Fast Race a go as it looked exactly like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Fast Race gives you a choice of 12 maps, then you get to choose a character, you then get three difficulties: Easy, Medium and Hard so we gave Easy ago. It was just like Mario Kart, but a younger version for little children as whilst you’re racing about you collect eggs which have a random item that you can use to help to win like Glue, Shields and Balls that can be either thrown backwards or forwards. It’s not entirely clear what all of them do though, to be honest.

Career Mode has six careers to choose from and each time you play it unlocks the next. Once you start it you get a short video on Ryan and his parents talking about the career mode, then once you have chosen a character you get to pick Easy, Medium or Hard.

Split Screen mode lets you play with up to four players, and the game is compatible with the Pro Controller. As we received this review copy as a code, we had to check to make sure. Unfortunately, you cannot use the Pro Controller as the main one, it has to be one of the other players - even in the single player parts. The screen is split vertically, but looks a bit squished in handheld mode. When docked, however, it’s nice and big.

When you pause the game, there is an option for Smart-Steering and Auto-Accelerate. Smart-Steering makes the game steer in the right direction for you, and Auto-Accelerate keeps you moving forwards. You can select them both so then all you have to do is keep an eye on when you collect an egg so you use the Magic Skill.

My six year old had been dying to have a go and so I handed the Switch over to her. She showed me “How to Play”, chose Easy and she found it very easy and understood what buttons did what right away. She does play Mario Kart a lot mind, though in her words the game is “good, I like it”.

There are 21 characters, all from the “Ryan” universe, though apart from different voices and lines, there’s no real difference between them all. The graphics are very bright and colourful, no glitches or any issues that we could see, the voices are loud even when the volume is turned down almost all the way, so Ryan’s voice and the other characters are easy enough to understand. As an adult, however, the voices can grate after even a short time. But hey, it’s aimed at kids.

If my daughter had her way the game itself would come out as a 10/10. It’s more expensive than the other games that 3DClouds have put out (all racing games, of course).