Have you ever wanted to star in your very own kart racer video game? Well now you can with Face Racers: Photo Finish. Use the 3DS camera to take pictures of your face, design your avatar’s look and create a kart, then challenge the CPU, your friends, or online in this crazy yet oh so typical kart racer.

To create your racer (up to six can be stored in the game), first you must go to the customization mode. There you can take a few pictures of your face in various expressions that’ll be used in the races (happy, mad, sad, etc.). You can also design other aspects of your racer, like clothes, hats, hair, and so on. Then it’s time to make a kart. Choose its color, tires, chassis, and more.

The racing part of the game is your typical kart racer fare. Race on crazy tracks and pick up weapons to use against the other racers to help you come in first place. There are Championship Cups where you race on four tracks each and earn points. Or go for a Quick Race around one of the tracks. There are also Time Trials and Battle Modes, too. As you win races, you’ll unlock new accessories and kart parts to customize your racer with. You can also challenge friends locally or even go online.

Gameplay is a bit typical and unimaginative for a kart racer, and the controls are slightly touchy, too. Plus there are missed opportunities to fully use the camera idea. Since you mostly see the back of your racer, you really don’t see your face that much. They do slap your mug on a few posters around the track, and one of the weapons taunts other players with a giant picture of your face to block their view, but that’s about it. How cool would it have been to be able to take pictures of your environment to use as track backgrounds, too?

Kid Factor:

Face Racers: Photo Finish is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Comic Mischief. And kids are really the ones who will get the most enjoyment out of this game. I bet they’ll have lots of fun creating racers out of themselves and their friends. They’ll probably have more fun making characters than actually racing! Taking photos and creating racers is easy to do, but reading skill is helpful for navigating around the menus. Light adult supervision is recommended if your kids want to play online since their photos will be in the game for the world to see.

Tags: Game Reviews