Wildshade: Unicorn Champions Review

I don’t typically play many racing games, though it was absolutely impossible to escape childhood without obtaining a familiarity with Mario Kart and the kart-racing genre as a whole. There are a handful I enjoy, and it typically doesn’t take much to pull me into one for a couple of races — even if only to see how it plays. Conversely, it takes a lot to actually make me fall in love with racing and come back to the same title again and again. With that in mind, I’ll be upfront: Nacon’s Wildshade: Unicorn Champions is not that game.

Wildshade takes the interesting direction of using horses — including many unicorns — instead of karts, which is both very fun if you want a brightly-coloured horse game and a mechanically distinct racing experience. After all, horses are not known for stopping on a dime. Once a race starts, your chosen horse will not stop until they cross the finish line, even if they get completely bowled over by a fireball. Besides that little wrinkle, the core of Wildshade is no different from any other kart racer: there are five tournaments with four courses each, seven other horses to race against in-game, various items that can disable other racers now reskinned as spells, and slight amount of customisation. Totalling 20 courses, there’s a sizable amount of variety here to sink your teeth into, but at its core, Wildshade is a kart racer like any other.

There is the wrinkle that Wildshade was originally a mobile game for iOS and Android, so many of the original design decisions stick around, like the relatively simple, cutesy art style and score. One aspect that is notably missing from this original vision is stats for the horses — where once different breeds had their ups and downs, Wildshade: Unicorn Champions simplifies matters by making every horse control basically the same. There are some relics of this old system in the loading screens, where various tips and tricks are shown to the player, including one that mentions how many of the starter horses are all-around okay at everything and very easy to train but don’t have any specialities (if I remember correctly, anyways — there isn’t a glossary in-game to look at all of these again). Removing this aspect does somewhat diminish the mechanical point of acquiring new horses to beef up your stable, but any lover of horses and unicorns will be sure to get plenty of fun out of witnessing all of the new designs and using them themselves. I, for one, absolutely loved my starter horse, Sky Mirror, and didn’t swap to anyone else except to test for differences.

Speaking of enjoying the variety of horses and unicorns on display, I should note that Wildshade has its pros and cons in this territory. For one, there are the horses’ names. Each horse is automatically given one, either through it being a default name or through random selection, but the player also has the option of giving the horsies a name themselves! Sadly, instead of opening a text box, the player is only given two lists of words and has to pick one in each of them to form a name. Yes, this counts as sad, because it meant the funny pun that I came up with to name the horse — Neighsayer — was not an option. Now, this is a title geared toward children with its PEGI rating of 3, so the simplicity here makes some sense, but I would still have liked to use a greater variety of names.

Thankfully, there’s a decent variety in the horses’ appearances to choose from. Well, you can change your horses’ bridle, saddle, and hair colour as soon as you unlock each desired piece, but the horses’ designs, patterns, eye colours, and so on are set by default. Furthermore, aside from the starters, you have to earn each subsequent horse by completing tournaments or progressing in the campaign. The only way to get wholly new horses is to breed the existing ones together to blend each horse’s designs into a new one. There doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many of these bred horses can stick around, so it is a little fun to try a variety of combinations and see what can come of them. I’ve even seen a few new designs that almost tempted me away from riding Sky Mirror!

As for the actual racing itself, I know I said earlier that Wildshade is a kart racer like any other, but there are a few other details that stand out. On the negative side of the equation, there’s the difficulty. Save for the campaign, any race or tournament can be attempted on easy, medium, or hard difficulty. However, the only change I noticed between these settings was in how aggressive the other racers were. They will certainly toss spells at you with glee in easy mode, but I certainly noticed many more obstacles getting set down and projectiles getting flung around in hard mode. Beyond that, there wasn’t any added speed or difficulty with handling. I’d still recommend starting out on easy mode so that you can get a handle on the controls and the spells, but if you can handle that, hard should prove no issue. However, I had some trouble occasionally with rubberbanding, getting caught on edges that seemed like they’d be easy to run over, and brutal dogpiling from my fellow racers, so Wildshade is no cakewalk on any difficulty setting. It’s not exactly the hardest experience out there, and I was able to do quite well overall, but I know I would have struggled with it as a kid and likely wouldn’t have wanted to keep playing.

The other main negative Wildshade has in spades is its spells (again, basically the items you’d find in any other kart racer). Don’t get me wrong, some of them are a blast to play around with, and the option to either pick them up on the track or build up a spell meter by drifting, jumping over obstacles, and collecting glowing balls is a fantastic addition. It may be a wee bit annoying to be 10% away from a spell and then pick one up anyway, thereby setting you back down to 0% once that spell is used, but having the option at all makes engaging with the whole course incredibly rewarding. However, a lot of the spells are difficult to tell apart, especially at first. Each one is represented by a symbol in your little spell area, and a lot of them are either obvious or easy to recognise once you’re used to them, like the shield for a shield powerup or wings for the pegasus spell, which essentially acts like Mario Kart’s Bullet Bill, but with flying a little higher off the ground. At the same time, there are a few that I still haven’t gotten down yet. There’s one that is actually quite interesting where you can hit multiple racers in front of you in a chain, and there’s also another one that essentially acts as Mario Kart’s Blue Shell, hitting the person in first place. I constantly struggle to tell the difference between these two because they both just seem like swirls to me: only one is whitish, and the other is blueish — not the easiest difference for me to spot in a moment. All the same, some practice will absolutely help you tell each spell apart from each other.

I have one final note on the spells, and it’s not really a negative at all. While many of the spells are essentially reworks of those classic Mario Kart items most people will recognise, some of those reworks actually make for a completely different experience. Take the fire and tornado spells, for instance. On the surface, they are red and green, serving as Wildshade’s version of the Red and Green Shells. However, the fire spell is fired directly and unerringly at a given rider, with a target even appearing to helpfully tell you which horse is going to take the hit. The tornado acts as the Green Shell does but takes up a sizably larger portion of the road and is often much harder to avoid. For this matter, I often hate it when I get a tornado unless there’s someone immediately ahead of me. Speaking of which, Wildshade also does not allow you to throw any spells behind you except for the ice wall and fire bomb, which act like little traps for people to run into. This isn’t necessarily a negative, but it is certainly annoying.

At the same time, Wildshade also offers some truly enjoyable course design. The 20 available aren’t exactly as varied as those you’d find in a recent Mario Kart title, but there’s a nice mix of sharp turns and winding paths throughout. One notable detail that many of the courses share is their penchant for shortcuts and alternate routes. Seriously, there are a lot of these, and they are quite satisfying to slip into. Interestingly enough, a large part of finding and using them properly is actually the enemy AI, which constantly demonstrates a lot of the techniques that the player should learn, from getting a perfect start at the beginning of the race to drifting to finding each of the shortcuts. I was worried at first that I was going to have to figure out a lot of the game’s mechanics on my own, despite the tutorial that you’re forced into when you first play. However, just by playing, I was learning a lot by watching the AI racers. Sure, this means they’ll catch up quickly, even on easy mode, but I wouldn’t have figured out how to actually play Wildshade properly without them being this skilled.

Now, I’ve been avoiding talking much about the specific modes that the player has access to. Beyond stuff like settings or the breeding portion of Wildshade, the game is split into the campaign, the tournaments, and simple one-time races. With races, you and up to three local friends — no online multiplayer to be seen in this title — can choose any of the 20 courses and enjoy two to three laps of racing. (Don’t ask me which tracks get two laps versus three; I can’t quite figure out why each one was chosen.) This is a very nice, very standard inclusion, but for some bizarre reason, once the race is finished, you only have the option to restart that specific race or quit out to the main menu again. I was sincerely expecting an option that would take you back to the course selection screen, but it seems that wasn’t a priority. Tournaments are a bit better because you can take those same up-to-three friends with you over any of the five sets of four courses and play through them all in one go, even unlocking some cosmetics and horses upon winning. Oh, I should also mention that it doesn’t seem like you can turn off the AI racers for multiplayer.

The campaign is slightly different in that you run through about 32 courses (many of them being mirrored variants of other courses) and receive stars for your placement in each race. Get enough stars and you unlock more races and a select few horses to use. Some of the later courses can get a little difficult — some of the shortcuts do not seem to have been designed with a mirrored course in mind — but it’s not too difficult. Sure, there’s no story to speak of, but this isn’t the worst series of courses I’ve played. I think it may have been more impressive just to throw out a mirrored tournament or three and not have a campaign at all, but it’s a fairly inoffensive inclusion.

That’s sort of what Wildshade is: inoffensive. The game works as a fun kart racer and, though it doesn’t reinvent the proverbial wheel — even as it reinvents the literal one by turning it into a hoof — or polish its experience to an impeccable state, it’s hard to call this a bad experience. I don’t, in any way, believe that I’ll come back to Wildshade or even think about it in the future, but if it were reasonably cheap, I’d recommend giving it a shot, especially if you like horses or unicorns. However, Wildshade: Unicorn Champions is sitting at a £34.99 price tag at the moment, and it just doesn’t offer enough to satisfy the cost, especially if you consider that you could just have a similar experience by grabbing it on your phone for free.