REVIEW : Kandagawa Jet Girls (PC)
So what do you get when you combine kart racing, anime girls and jet skis? Yes you guessed it right it’s Kandagawa Jet Girls. It’s the latest game to be offered by the same studio released Kagura series and many of you must have played this game and if you have you must have at least once to check this game out. The game is produced by EGG Firm and developed by honey parade games. So let’s take a look at story there isn’t really one the game rather than focusing on telling one story with some exciting plot instead uses the upcoming jet ski tournament called kandagawa cup as the backbone of the story to create link with lives of the competition racers, their struggles and ultimately their story of overcoming them in pretty light-hearted way. There are a total of 8 vignettes. of these 8, 7 explore duos of double d dames giving each of the 14 characters ample screen time. The vignettes serve as a cap to the overall plot and finale to the seventh character tory which is locked till the first 6 are completed. These stories are spread across quality and believability and to be honest when you play seriously it can get a little hard to get behind the story of characters. But games are actually good if you are looking for a way out and want to play something very casual and fun. you might end up finding some plots of the characters very interesting while some really boring. In a way the problems faced like life or death and existential crises are online but these are portrayed as background issues that it really doesn’t feel like you have to overcome some great challenges. And when this ends the game also ends. Not the best effort but a good one. Well a racing game with a story would have been a lot better and would have created a lot more interest for players. But as far as the type of the game goes most people don’t buy racing games for the plot of the game.
Taking a look at technical aspects now let’s start by going over racing mechanics. Functionally the game is basically a kart racing game which has drawn some inspiration from Mario kart double dash where we have a jetter and a gunner . The jetter controls the jet ski while the gunner shoots the approaching enemy racers and various obstacles which might hinder your path to victory. Every gunner gets the same default weapon at the start of the race and can pick different weapons from the itm boxes as you race. You can fire both ways front and behind while in case of shooting behind you will have much more accuracy as auto aim will be doing most of the work just like auo steering will prevent you from crashing at this time and that’s the most part of a gunner’s role. Outside this gunner really doesn’t play much of a role in racing. For jetter it’s pretty standard while you drift there is a mete charging at the bottom of the screen the more distance you rift the more it charges higher the charge the loger will be the boost after you exit the drift mode. Every trick like ramps, charging stations, drifts will charge your epd metre which is a booster but needs at least 20% to run at 100% you can use a special ability which is different for each duo but if you have non default weapon epd ability will be based on that. .The game offers a solid and very well configured racing mechanics so for a studio that usually don’t make games like this they have done a pretty well and I have to give them credit for doing a pretty decent job in making the racing mechanics they have covered all the bases like drifting, bosting and tricks all of which are pretty much necessary for an arcade racing game.
Each jet racer has a nice sense of weight and feels very good when you control them. Unlike traditional racing games in which you get to control only horizontal movements in this you have to control the position of the nose of the jet ski to make sure you head in the right direction and get maximum speed. It will take you some time to get the hang of controlling the ski but once you do you will be drifting around, doing tricks and might even find it easy to capture that first place.
The maps are limited but are very well defined which gives a boost to the whole gaming experience with just 8 maps with 2 day time settings . The game might have some issues but the foundation laid for a decent racing game by the producers is pretty good. Coming on to jet skis each duo has their own unique jet ski with different capabilities like different acceleration, handling etc the usual stuff. These jet skis are customizable according to your need so don’t worry. The machine parts are rather pricey and unlock as you play the game. The game offers a solution to money problems by adding mini games which will provide you with loads of money with very simple tasks. Though the idea is simple and nice buying the parts doesn’t mean you will be able to use all of them at once. There is a limit to how many parts you can equip and that is decided by the equipment points which is really a bummer. So you have to win more races in order to increase this limit.
Despite putting so much effort into making this game what it is, it doesn’t add up to much common thread. Here kenichiro games are often imbalanced. So this fun with that lack of balance is destroying the experience and undermining the mechanics and making them completely useless at times, and the AI in the game is so bad that in some races you will just press the acceleration button and turn and you still might win by a good margin. So when you use the mechanics you will end up finishing the race a minute before tan your opponent or even lapping them. I think Maximum acceleration is really what you need. You start the race by getting ahead. In the very beginning you are most probably the winner of the race which ends up making all the special techniques and weapons useless and at times there will be no one around to fire these weapons at.
So coming on to the conclusion the game narrows down to spending time with fun and lightheaded characters in short visual anime segments with races as highlights. At least the game looks good and sound effects are also working well with the game theme so you can’t complain there. But performance isn’t quite what it needs to be. One of the major performance issue that is noticeable is at the pre race cut scenes when announcers are talking at this time frame rate is dropping and screen tearing runs rampant.
