The whole kart-racer genre seems to be either hit or miss. Mario Kart is great, Sonic and SEGA is great, Burger King PocketBike Racer causes severe blood leakage from your eyeballs and don’t even get me started on M&M’s Kart Racing.
Kart-racers are extremely simple. The entire genre is made so that children can easily pick up and play but the best still hold a small amount of complexity so that adults can enjoy them too. The complexity may be in divergences in the track, which power-up is better than the rest, finding ways to unlock new characters and vehicles. There’s a challenge in a good kart-racer. Guess what, Coffin Dodgers has none of that complexity.
It has power-ups, they’re all boring and lack any depth. It has unlockable characters; well, a single unlockable character. It has divergences in the track—oh, that’s a lie; it doesn’t. Everything that makes a kart-racer great is missing from Coffin Dodgers. There is a lack of depth. Coffin Dodgers feels shallower than the bedpan under its cast’s beds.
The premise of Coffin Dodgers is arguably the best aspect of the entire game. You play as one of seven retired oldies in the residence of Sunny Pines. During the night, you are spoken to by the Grim Reaper and are told that he will snatch your soul away in three days. Obviously, not wanting to die quite yet, you challenge the Reaper to a racing tournament where the winner gets to keep their soul and not be murdered.
Then the game starts. You choose a character from the seven oh-so-wacky pensioners with faces consisting of about twelve polygons and are thrust into a tutorial that takes place in the frame-rate murdering open world; if you can call it an open world. Thankfully, you can skip this but as a reviewer, I needed to play through this forsaken nightmare of a stutter-fest to review the game properly. When I finished the tutorial I was oh-so-relieved only to discover that the same location is used for the first three races.
Not every track in Coffin Dodgers is prone to performance problems this much. While later stages do still have their amount of drops and stutters they are forgivable, you can deal with them for the most part. Coffin Dodgers isn’t even a graphically demanding title. It looks like an early 360 game with small tracks, fairly low texture quality and a pretty low—extremely low if compared to current-gen games—poly-count. On a system that can run Forza Motorsport 6 at 60fps and 1080p, the amount of optimization put into Coffin Dodgers appears to be next-to-none.
The worst part about this is that Coffin Dodgers gameplay is mediocre at best. All races across the games five or so tracks consist of the same formula. Wait until just after the timer counts down and then press down the accelerate button so you can move—or enable the auto-accelerate in the pause menu if you actually bought this game for a very young child—spam the B button to whack racers with your cane, blow people up to smithereens with a couple of power-ups and then run away in first place for the next four laps because the AI won’t catch up with you.
After you finish a race you gain coins—as well as XP that doesn’t seem to do anything—which can be used to upgrade your scooter. Upgrading your scooter makes the game even easier; increasing your top speed, acceleration and amount of power-ups you can hold make you incredibly overpowered when going up against the games simplistic AI. Many of the tracks as well are simplistic too. As I mentioned earlier, there are no divergences, and they also feel generally uninspired. There’s a town, an alien-invaded farm and a graveyard with a couple more tracks merging these few themes together. While there are occasionally zombified pedestrians or animals for you to run over for more of that useless XP, once you get into that lull of the forever-first-place situation Coffin Dodgers becomes extremely boring as you end up picking up endlessly repeating power-ups—due to awful RNG—and randomly firing them, trying to discover some form of interactivity apart from zooming along an empty road.
A game’s longevity, however, comes from the post-completion content that you receive. There is only one unlockable item for you to get in Coffin Dodgers—the Grim Reaper. The Angel of Death becomes yours to race with throughout all modes of the game, including the story mode. Completing the story mode as the Reaper, however, will only result in a slightly different ending. All of the end-race dialogue of the Reaper about how much he hates the elderly competitors stays the same . . . even though he’s winning.
After completing the extremely short story mode twice there are three more modes for you to attempt to enjoy, the extremely small and basic open world, a time trial mode and a split-screen mode for you to play locally with friends. Performance in the split-screen versions of these modes only takes a slightly smaller dip than what the game already offers with the awful stuttering just becoming ever-so-slightly more pronounced.
Summary
Coffin Dodgers could have been the kart-racer that fans of the genre were waiting for. It also could have been good. Instead, Coffin Dodgers is an extremely limited and mediocre attempt at creating a kart-racer that somehow manages to stutter along on hardware that should far exceed the requirements of this title. This, along with its low texture quality, low-poly models, and basic to-the-point-of-boring gameplay makes Coffin Dodgers look and play as old as its cast.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.