Nightmare Kart is entirely style over substance.

The various racers, karts, tracks, and weapons have a lot of variety and a fun PS1 aesthetic that does a lot to keep this game charming. I love Nicholas as a character who just runs instead of using a kart or the big pig you can ride. It tries to come up with creative ways to blend in parts of Bloodbourne in to a kart racer. You have a choice of melee weapons, and boss fights as a few examples. There is a well thought out game here with devs that I can tell poured passion into it.

When the rubber actually hits the road though, boy howdy, the AI is god awful. A racing game would assume competition but the frequency I found AI driving in to walls and not being able to get out for an entire race was almost every race. Which really sucks because it removed any sense of serious difficulty, urgency, and competition. Mix this with when you hit a wall or enemy you are coming to a dead stop so the flow of a race gets ruined quite quickly.

The game is free so I would encourage people to at least try it to see the neat visual designs, and you can get through the campaign in under an hour and a half. I hope this team takes another crack at this because if they could match the visual aesthetic and design with just good AI and some better collision physics, I would have rated this much higher because there are a lot of good ideas here.

I can only describe this dlc as going back to a meal I enjoyed a second time without the revelatory discovery of “hot damn that was really good” because I knew going in to this that it would be good.

Baseline, the systems of RE 4 hit in all of the same ways but with a grappling hook. Playing through Separate Ways helped me cement some thoughts around RE 4 Remake. The key one being that this game compared to RE2 I think is much easier to pick up without clenching my cheeks through the first act. Which that sounds stupid, but as much as I love the first act of RE2 and Mr.X, I feel like I have to prepare myself to play that game. RE4 you can just slide in zero stress and have a great time start to finish, and I think this DLC speaks to that.

My only gripes with this dlc is the grappling hook movement can feel very gimmicky. This is forgiven by how it plays in to melee combat (especially when you can rip shields away). Secondly, the Ada voice acting can feel very stilted at times. I think this is mainly a consequence of turning a side character to being a main protagonist.

Overall, for the price especially, go play this DLC if you enjoyed the base game.