Go Kart Island recently released for the Nintendo Switch 2. Is it worth your time, or is this just shovelware?
Read on to find out.
Go Kart Island wants to be the cozy open-world kart racer you didn’t know you needed — starring an adorable highland cow named Lachlan who’s trying to raise 1,000 coins and take down a corrupt weasel mayor. On paper it’s irresistible. In practice, it’s a game that constantly reminds you it was made by one person on a tight budget… and not always in flattering ways.
Concept and Presentation
The game sells itself on pure charm. You’re a fluffy highland cow with racing dreams, the island is bright and colorful, the animal NPCs are quirky, and the writing has a dry British sense of humor that lands a few solid laughs early on.
Unfortunately that charm is skin-deep. After the first hour the jokes repeat themselves, the NPCs run out of dialogue, and the “evil mayor” plot is little more than an excuse to string races together. It’s cute for a while, then it just feels like a Saturday-morning cartoon that forgot to write a second act.
Gameplay and Content
An open-world kart racer with no loading screens sounds fantastic on paper. In reality the world is tiny — you can drive from one end to the other in under two minutes — and strangely empty. Exploration quickly becomes busywork: smashing the same billboards and vacuuming up floating coins while a counter slowly climbs.
The 34 events attempt variety with elimination races, time trials, taxi missions, and mouse chases, but most suffer from loose, floaty handling and aggressive rubber-banding AI. Drifting rarely feels rewarding, items are wildly unbalanced, and the complete absence of multiplayer (local or online) drains the genre of its usual chaotic joy.
Technical Performance on Switch 2
The game targets 30 fps on Nintendo’s new hardware and mostly hits it, though you’ll notice occasional dips when karts pile up or particle effects go wild. Colors pop nicely on the upgraded handheld screen, and the seamless world means load times are essentially nonexistent.
Textures are low-res, pop-in is frequent, and the frame-rate never feels as smooth as you’d hope from a next-gen console. It’s perfectly playable, but it doesn’t showcase what the Switch 2 can do — it just feels like a slightly prettier Switch 1 game.
Final Verdict
Go Kart Island is a heartfelt solo-dev effort that overflows with personality in short bursts. Lachlan is undeniably lovable, the item ideas are wonderfully silly, and there are fleeting moments where everything clicks and you’ll genuinely smile.
Those moments are too rare. Repetitive missions, an empty world, frustrating physics, and zero multiplayer support keep it from ever being more than a curiosity. At full price it’s hard to recommend; on a deep sale it’s a pleasant weekend distraction for anyone who really, really loves highland cows. Everyone else should keep cruising past.
A cute idea that runs out of gas long before the finish line.
5
Go Kart Island review code provided by publisher and reviewed on a Nintendo Switch 2. For more information on scoring, please read What our review scores really mean.
