Mini Madness [Xbox]
D6 Team’s Mini Madness is an arcade racing game inspired by the likes of Micro Machines, with you taking control of a little mini-vehicle, as you drive around different household locations, weaving around and under the furniture. There are different surfaces for you to drive on, from hardwood flooring to carpet, each with different effects on your handling and speed, and each location has alternate routes as well as hidden stars (and sometimes secrets) for you to find.
There are three modes for you to play, with a Training mode available for you to get used to how the controls feel, and learn the different skills and abilities you have. It gives you the freedom to explore the environments too, as you complete each of the tasks, although they don’t really give you much of a guide on how to do the things, just that you can.
Single Player has Championship, Quick Race, Time Trial and Challenge, with each of these being fairly standard in what they are; Championship has you competing against three other vehicles, with each Championship having four events over two tracks, with the two tracks being repeated - but with pick-ups to attack your opponents the second time round. Multiplayer is just for local play, which is a shame as an online option would have been appreciated. You can play with up to two other people split-screen, which adds a bit of fun and competitiveness into the mix - since that’s sadly lacking when you’re up against the AI opponents.
Visually, it actually looks fairly decent with the locations being well detailed, albeit quite low-resolution. Tracks advertise the upcoming turns, à la Colin McRae Rally, and the controls feel decent, if slightly floaty (but if you’ve ever raced a toy car along a track, you’ll know they like to fly off!) with good drifting and cool flips - although the wide variety of routes open to you in races (including gravity walls if you’ve unlocked the gravity module for your vehicle) can make it easy to go off track, or fall into dead zones; but your opponents never seem to put up too much of a challenge even with a few mistakes here and there.
The environments are interactive, which is a great inclusion - so crashing into dominoes will knock them over, and items such as clocks and bottles that are set up as guard rails at certain points of the track can be bumped out of place, falling to the floor and making the track much more treacherous on your next lap. There are a bunch of pickups available to you during some events, such as various projectiles as well as checkpoint-reset drops. You can also find coins during each outing, and these can be spent on new vehicles, upgrades for your vehicles’ engines, as well as different visual upgrades - although it’ll take you quite a bit to save up enough to purchase all the cars!
There are 60 stars hidden around the world for you to collect, with other areas becoming accessible once you’ve found enough, and these do keep you on your toes, as they are often in areas you’ll not necessarily notice whilst whizzing round a track. You might also need to carefully angle your car up ramps and across precariously balanced items such as floppy disks, and this can make it take just a bit more effort to achieve. We would have liked to see these implemented a little better however, as it can feel quite tedious hunting them down, which is a shame.
Available for £8.39 on the Xbox Store, Mini Madness is a bit of a mixed bag. It feels okay, and it’s enjoyable to go up against friends, but unfortunately it does feel very lacking in a lot of areas. A proper career mode, or even an online mode would possibly have helped to spice things up a bit, giving you the added challenge of playing against people that will actually make a race feel more intense, but as it stands, it’s only really worth a quick game or two on split screen before you’ll inevitably move onto something else.
In the end, we decided to give Mini Madness the Collecting Asylum rating of 5.5/10.
Are you interested in Mini Madness? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Drageus Games for the Mini Madness Xbox review code!
