Coffin Dodgers is an arcade kart racer that takes Mario Kart to the retirement home. The story is simple: The Grim Reaper descends on a peaceful retirement village and tells seven old folks that he’s going to take their souls. Obviously resistant, the group decides to strike a deal with Death: They can live as long as they beat him in a race. The entire concept of Coffin Dodgers is one that makes me laugh — It’s a clever idea. Having quirky senior citizens compete with Death himself by racing with scooters in order to preserve their place on earth is something I never would’ve expected.
Coffin Dodgers includes four modes: Story, Quick Race, Time Trial, and Open World. Quick race and Time Trial are self explanatory, and Open World just lets you explore the maps without any barriers. Story mode has you race through five different environments (three races each) and attempt to win enough to keep death from taking your soul. The interesting part of this is those who end up on the bottom will be turned into zombies, and those racers end up becoming much more skilled. The amount of racers who get their souls taken increases for each new area, so the stakes really do start increasing as you go along in the story.
Unfortunately, the story isn’t very interesting. The entire thing is told through one single cutscene at the beginning of the game; it has no voice acting, no music, no nothing. It’s entirely lifeless. That’s the first issue that jumped out at me: The game lacks personality. For a game that involves geezers competing with the grim reaper, it sure is bland. None of the characters really stand out. They’re funny stereotypes, yes — but that’s about it. I feel as though if some silly voice acting was added to the game, this might not have been the case.
A great addition is the ability to upgrade your kart with gold you get by completing races. Watching your dinky hoveround slowly become a 95 year old’s definition of a hotrod adds a nice layer of depth and progression to the game. The one issue with this is the game makes it very difficult to earn gold. I could never get enough for one upgrade after two or even three races, which quickly started leaving me in the dust due to my substandard kart.
As for the actual racing — well, it’s not very good. Turning and accelerating feels incredibly jerky, and I felt like I was racing on ice. The tracks don’t help this either; Most tracks are a series of sharp turns, one after another, and the karts go much too fast for this. With no ability to really drift, like Mario Kart — Or really any racing game — it makes turning a hassle. The tracks just feel too cramped for such face paced racing — Even with upgrades to improve my kart’s performance.
Powerups are scattered throughout each track. These can be used for defensive or offensive purposes. Each racer also has a weapon they can use at any time in close range to stun or knock over other racers. Weapons include lock on rockets, an oil slick, a shield, rocket boosters, and even a machine gun. There’s something glorious about watching a little old lady gun down zombies with an uzi. I do wish, however, that there were more powerups, and that they were a little more creative. Not to mention, the only powerup that is of any use is the rocket weapon. They’ll lock onto two racers and knock them over on contact. The machine gun doesn’t even seem to do anything half of the time — Sometimes it would knock racers over, and sometimes it just wouldn’t. The rocket boosters are basically useless, as they’ll usually cause you to crash rather than get ahead in the race. This is, again, due to how cramped and curvy the racetracks are, and how strangely the karts control.
My biggest problem with the game, however, is its unforgiving –unfair– difficulty. The controls are annoying, the powerups are only useful 60% of the time, the tracks are too narrow and cramped, and to make matters worse — The game is way too difficult in general; to an unfair degree. It starts off easy enough, you get used to the terrible way the karts control, but quickly the other racers start getting upgraded karts. This shouldn’t be an issue, given that you can upgrade your kart as well; however, as I said before, the game gives you hardly any gold per race, so it gets to the point where you have to complete several races in order to build up enough gold for a single upgrade. Here’s the kicker: You can’t replay races to grind gold.
As far as I can tell, races cannot be replayed at all. This means you have to buy the correct upgrades early on, or else you’ll be dead. It gets to a point where all the other racers are just much faster than you are. I tried seeing if maybe you had to play quick races or multiplayer to earn more, but unfortunately that was not the case with quick races, and no one was playing online at the time of writing this.
Another problem with the difficulty is getting knocked over by other racers in general. The melee attack works about half the time for the player, but if you get close to an NPC, they’ll knock you over right quick. It’s almost impossible to predict, because I swear their reach is longer than your own. Sometimes the melee will knock you over, sometimes it’ll spin you out, and sometimes it’ll do nothing. You can charge its power up, but even so, sometimes it just will not do a thing.
Getting knocked over is a total pain — The time to respawn is far too long, and the invincibility time is so short that many times I’d get knocked over three times right in a row and couldn’t do a thing about it. The respawn time is the most aggravating aspect of this; if you’re knocked out, you have to sit and watch your lifeless prune of a corpse sit on the road for about 2-3 seconds, and in that time almost every single racer will most likely pass you and put you in last place. Even if you smack into a wall at the right angle (which is frequently) you’ll bite it. There were several instances where I was at the beginning of the race, catching up and making headway, but then I’d get knocked over, and every other racer would be so fast in their upgraded karts that I wouldn’t be able to catch up to a single one for the entire race.
It’s just an aggravating mess. It’s totally unbalanced, and any potential fun is sucked from the game due to this one big fact. Coffin Dodgers is just too unbalanced. In games like Mario Kart, you have balance. Mario Kart has powerups specific to people who aren’t doing well to try and give them an edge. Some karts are faster than others, but not infinitely fast to the point where no one can catch them. This, sadly, is not the case with Coffin Dodgers, and the game suffers tremendously for it. It’s a great, funny concept of a game, but there’s just very little fun to be had with it.
A code for Coffin Dodgers was provided for purpose of this review