That's not to say that
Smurf Racer is all that entertaining when it comes to actually playing the game. It amounts to perhaps the most boring kart racing game I've ever played on the PSX, with absolutely nothing new to offer to the genre and even quite a few steps back for the formula.
The core game mode is the Championship, where you race through ten different courses with a single racer. Every batch of three has a different setting (village, castle, and . . . mixed, along with the last space level), and you have to race the three tracks in order. You also have to pick your racer, all of whom you'll recognize if you ever watched the show. Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Harmony . . . they're all there.
The problem comes when you actually start to play the game. There are precisely two weapons in the game -- a missile that fires forward, which everyone has, and a 'secret weapon' that fires backwards. Everyone's is different, mind you (Papa throws magic potions, Harmony throws notes, Painter throws paint) but they all do precisely the same thing. Whee.
Besides the ammo for those two weapons, you can find invincibility potions and boosts on the track.
And that's it.
There are only four racers at a time, which makes for a very dull last lap, as usually you're so far ahead of them that you never even get attacked while you're racing. The Expert mode tries to make it a little challenging by forcing you to cross checkpoints within a certain amount of time to get your car wound back up, but it ends up being moot. I never lost a single race when I played the game to completion.
The worst part about the game is the length of the tracks. The first few are nice and short, but the last set of tracks are so ungodly long that you'll be wishing that the game were over by the time you get done with the first lap -- and then you realize you have to do two more circuits. Even though the graphics are nice, the tracks look self-similar, so you'll find yourself not much caring about how far along you are, just wanting to do your three laps so you can get on to the next one.
I beat the entire game in forty-five minutes, and it only took another forty to beat it again in Expert mode.
You unlock four characters by racing the ten tracks, but do you really expect them to make the game any better? There's a two-player mode, and you can do flag races, but there are much better two-player kart racers out there.
