Day 53 - Disney Speedstorm
Driving, Nightmare Fuel, Disney Trash ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Oh, boy. I don’t think I’ve had a worse gaming experience than Disney Speedstorm.
I’m not even being hyperbolic. This was without a doubt, one of the worst 50 minutes I have willingly spent.
I’ll lay the dirty out real quick before I get too into it - this is essentially a Mario Kart racer with an ugly Disney gift wrapping over it. You race karts on tracks against 7 other Disney characters and can collect pick-ups that allow you to use items to screw over the other racers.
Sam and I had some extra time today, so we decided we would try to find a multiplayer game to try together. And thus began our extremely disappointing descent into Disney Speedstorm.
Disney Speedstrom feels like it was built from the ground up to squeeze money out of you like the dirty dollar sponge you are. Naturally, the game follows that mobile game playbook of “Give you some stuff for free up front to get you hooked, and you’ll come crawling back later”! This is also a common trope for drug dealers. I don’t even know where to begin. You have to unlock everything in this game. You know how Disney has a bunch of fun, iconic characters to choose from? Guess what? You will either have to grind hours into the game to unlock one of them, or break out that nice shiny plastic money card and pay up, you fucking piggy. Walt’s head isn’t going to keep itself frozen! Want to play a circuit/grand prix race? Well, if you don’t have one of the characters unlocked from that world you can’t play, so better pay up you fucking swine. You don’t have fucking Mike Wazowski, so you can’t play the Monster’s Inc Course you fucking numbnuts! What’s worse is even if you drop a character from the loot box system (because of course this game has a loot box system and daily log-in rewards), you don’t even unlock the fucking character. You unlock progress towards unlocking the character. It’s fucking horrendous.
Disney Speedstorm loves to constantly remind you that you can give it money. When you launch the game, you are met with an advertisement to take you to the store. When you finish a race - BOOM - advertisement to go purchase characters from the store. Disney Speedstorm doesn’t want you to play it. It wants you to spend money on it. It doesn’t care about being a racing game. It cares about money. It doesn’t care about you playing with your friends. It would rather have money. Disney Speedstorm isn’t even a game - it’s a virtual tourist trap trying to peddle its “Epic Rarity” voice lines and victory poses to you.
Hell, Disney Speedstorm is so anti-game it hides the fucking “Invite Friend to Lobby” option behind a level 3 battlepass tier (this is not a joke). If you’re going to make your players grind to play with each other, you better make sure the fucking game actually lets you play with another player.
Sam and I spent 40 minutes grinding race after race against computer NPC racers. The entire time we played this game, we did not see a single real player. It was the same 7 computer racers with the same name every time. Sam was streaming in Discord during all of this, and we confirmed the AI racers shared the same names between our games, so it wasn’t just a small population of real players, it was computers every single time.
I mention this, because once we finally hit Rank 3 on the battlepass and unlocked the “feature” to join each other’s parties, we still couldn’t play together.
We would join into a party together, both ready up with the play button, and the game would find a match for us, but put each of us into our own game against the same computers we have been playing against. We tried remaking the lobby, we tried restarting the game, we even resorted to Google to see if anyone else had this issue. Sam read an article that said our racers had to be the same level. We tried that. Same issue. I found a steam forum post from Oct. 2023 that mentioned this same issue, and one of the comments just said “yeah, they’ll probably never fix it.”
And herein lies the main reason I abhor Disney Speedstorm. The fucking multiplayer for a multiplayer PVP game doesn’t even work. You know what does work though? The shop, the battlepass, the loot boxes, and any other predatory gaming practice that Gameloft squeezed into this trite piece of shit. My only logical explanation as to why this garbage trash even exists is if Gameloft hired one of the 7 Deadly Sins to help out with the design of this game (I’ll let you guess which one).
When I review “Joe Schmoes” Brick Breaker clone game he made in Unity in a day and threw it up on itch.io, I may poke fun at it or be a little mean to it, but I am normally coming from a good place and understand where those games are coming from - a place of learning, artistic expression, or are made for a quick joke, etc.
Unfortunately, I also understand where Disney Speedstorm is coming from - it’s pocket book. Disney Speedstorm is something I truly hate. Not “joking around” or “poking fun” with this, just pure, unfiltered vile towards these kinds of business practices. What’s really ironic is this game is probably not making any money because of how predatory the monetization system is. Imagine if Gameloft focused on making a real, playable and fun game rather than focusing on getting the player to spend $20 on a Petunia Pink Mulan racing suit.
Fuck off Disney Speedstorm. Fuck off forever.
Recommend: Never(land)
Replay Percentage Chance: -9999999999999999999999999%
Time Played: 50 minutes of a modern, authentic Disney experience
Sam’s Take:
Disney Speedstorm is the worst game I’ve ever played. This is not hyperbolic, I thought through every bad game I’ve played before this. I’ve played several confusing Saloon ‘Butch Cassidy’-likes for both this and our previous review series, but those aren’t even in the same league. Not a single one tried to get me to spend 99.99 on the best value Disney Fun Bucks.
Some other contenders I thought of were the dating sims we vetoed because of questionable moral content. I won’t spell out what I’m talking about, but let’s just say teenage boys shouldn’t be allowed to make sex games. These games are certainly vile, but even then I’m just upset at the creator. They might perpetuate a culture I don’t want to be a part of, but the amount of tangible harm they do is very small. I think games targeted at children using psychological traps to siphon their parent’s money genuinely cause more day-to-day problems than these gross games.
So then, obviously, I thought about other children’s casinos like Fortnite, but Fortnite is a functional game. I can download it right now, get in a party with my friends, and honestly have a pretty good time. I played Fortnite when it came out and after a few seconds of clicking through fifteen new bundle deals, you get a solid 30+ minutes of playing a shooty game with your buds.
Disney Speedstorm does not work. Skeeter and I tried for an hour to play a game together, and even after playing enough fake races against bots to unlock party-mode, we still never got in a game together. We were in a party, it wouldn’t let either of us start a race until we had both readied up. Then when the match loaded up, we were never in the same race. The whole point of us planning on playing this game today was that we had time to do a multiplayer game together, but that ain’t happening.
Disney Speedstorm is also not a game, at least not primarily. Obviously most free to play games have a money making scheme attached to them. Again, Fortnite is the most used example of a predatory free to play game, so let’s run the numbers. In Fortnite (at least back when I played) you got bombarded by the store and daily quests after every match and when you launched the game. I’d wager this is roughly once every thirty minutes. Also every item was purely cosmetic, there was no way to buy an advantage. In Disney Speedstorm, you are shown an advertisement for the store after every two minute race. Also you can use these fun bucks to buy new characters that have different stats, and each character is upgradable, literally allowing you to buy your way to victory either by paying time or sweet sweet US dollars.
The funny money is so confusing in fact, that I legitimately don’t know if the currency you get from buying Disney Fun Bucks is the transferable to the currency you use when upgrading your character. There are at least three different currencies running around this shop, and the only thing I can say for certain is that whoever is responsible for designing this storefront wants you to be as confused as possible.
How is the racing? WHO FUCKING CARES?! For every minute I spent racing I spent five claiming rewards and clicking through the eighty different menus trying to get multiplayer to work, or trying to play against real humans instead of the bots with fake usernames I was obviously up against in every match (they always had the same names, for both me and Skeeter). You may have a reaction to a review like this, like I’m reviewing the store and not the game, BUT NEWSFLASH MOTHERFUCKER! THE STORE IS THE GAME AND IT WANTS YOUR PARENT’S MONEY SO BAD. IT’S TEXTIN’ YOUR PARENTS AT 3AM ASKING, “HEY, U UP?”. THEN WHEN YOUR PARENTS BREAK DOWN AND START TO GIVE INTO THE ADVANCES… BAM NOT ENOUGH CURRENCY BITCH!
NOT
ENOUGH
CURRENCY
Should be the fucking motto for this game.
In summary, I played Disney Speedstorm for one hour. In that hour I never played with my friends, nor even with another human being. After each new failure, the game congratulated me on unlocking new opportunities to give them money. They try to hide behind cheap flashy aesthetics, but we can see through the maxed out saturation slider. We can hear though the trap-beat remix of Make a Man Out of You.
Disney Speedstorm is pathetic, and I genuinely hope every single person involved feels guilty.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 0%
Time Played: 1 Hour
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