Review: GENSOU: Skydrift – PS5, PS4

I’ve raced a lot of things in my career as a video game reviewer. I’ve raced cars, boats, planes, monster trucks, and even lorries. Unfortunately, I can now add little girls to that list.

GENSOU: Skydrift is a kart-racer without the karts. Instead of riding a four-wheeled contraption, you ride… little girls. Yeah, it’s f&*king weird and I would investigate the hard drive of anybody who says that this looks like their kind of game.

The idea is that instead of racing a kart, you race two girls, one on top of the other, a bit like riding a surfboard if the surfboard was made out of a cartoon child. And no, I don’t care if they’re actually 7,000 years old. They look about 8, and I don’t need to see up the dress of a child – in a racing game or not.
GENSOU: Skydrift apparently takes inspiration from Mario (the kart racer, not the local kiddy fiddler) but the game is so far off that kind of quality it makes any comparison between the two null and void. This is not a Mario Kart clone, or at least, it’s not a very good one.

The handling is, to be fair, half-decent – but that’s the standard also met by Race With Ryan – and there’s even a functional drifting mechanic that is essential to success. You can also switch your riders around so that the rider becomes the ridden, and vice versa. Powerups are in, too, though they’re not picked up during races. Instead, you have to wait for your power bar to fill up – and you can boost this by driving (floating? Flying?) through the rings that are placed through the courses. Don’t expect to know what any powerups do, though, as the game does nothing to explain anything to you. I gave up trying to figure out what each icon meant. I just wanted to get through to the end and be done with the game.
The single-player content is bare bones: you get a single-player campaign that runs for a couple of hours with character dialogue popping up on-screen between races. I didn’t care for this at all, so I smashed the X button as fast as possible so I could get on to the next race. I’ve got better things to do with my time than watch little cartoon girls talking nonsense, thank you very much.

The tracks in the game are varied but poor. They don’t look all that great, and some are downright annoying to play with their death-falls and poor design. Mario Kart, this ain’t.
Outside of the campaign, there’s not much else. There’s an online mode that I tried to play but it looks like none of my fellow reviewers were online. Good for them, I say.
There’s also a split-screen option, but neither my partner nor my four-year-old son were interested and I don’t blame them. We have Mario Kart on the Switch and countless other capable kart racers on the PlayStations and Xboxes. And I suppose that’s really what I’ve got to say about the game: if you’ve got another kart racer on another console – and I mean literally any other kart racer – you’ll have more to do there, and more fun. Unless little girls are your thing, in which case, get out.