I'm a big fan of kart racers, and I've made a point of trying out as many of them as I can. Race With Ryan is far from the worst one I've played, but it's still underwhelming. It's a competent kart racer that feels good mechanically, which was a pleasant surprise given the license and what seems to be a modest budget. Unfortunately, it's dragged down by its lack of content, spotty production, and off-putting license.

I don't know much about Ryan and his channel, other than he is a Youtube child star who does unboxing videos. While I find the idea of a Youtube child star off-putting, I don't want to focus too much on the license here, other than to say that the developers make thorough use of it. Ryan and his family are all over this game; They appear in cutscenes, Ryan narrates the menus, and he even pops up in the corner Mortal Kombat style during races. This is great if you're a kid who's a fan of the channel, and pretty grating if you're not.

Of course, even if you are a fan, the production quality is really spotty. Some voice clips sound fine, some are unintelligible, and most just sound like somebody recording themselves at home on a laptop mic. It's not just below the quality I would expect from a professionally produced video game, but below the quality I would expect from a large Youtube channel. Even the loading screens include grainy pictures that are clearly blown up much larger than they should be; it's pretty amateur hour stuff for a game that isn't Steam shovelware.

That said, production doesn't matter very much if you have good gameplay, and Race With Ryan fortunately plays pretty well. The cars handle well, they feel like they have an appropriate amount of weight to them, the game has a decent sense of speed, and the drifting mechanics work great. Most lower budget kart racers struggle to manage any one of these things, so it's a nice surprise for this one to get so much right. The items are pretty generic and basic, but they're serviceable and none of them are overly annoying. My only real gripes with the racing are that, despite having a Mario Kart style drift boost system, there is no indicator for when you're charging a boost, and all of the karts seem to have the same stats. Those things are disappointing, but they're pretty minor overall.

The place where the game really falters is the track selection. The tracks themselves are fine. They're pretty wide and don't have many sharp turns or bottomless pits like many kart racer tracks do. While this means they aren't very challenging, it also means they aren't very frustrating, which is great for a game that's intended for small children. Even though the tracks are easy, they have enough complexity with branching paths and obstacles to keep them interesting. The problem is that there are only six of them, twelve if you count the reverse versions. The game has six cups available, but only because it repeats tracks in different orders; a couple of the later cups even include both the forward and reverse versions of the same track. It gets very repetitive, very quickly, especially since you need to replay most of the cups on different difficulties to get all of the unlocks and achievements. It starts as a pretty pleasant little kart racer, but it quickly turns into a monotonous grind.

While Race With Ryan is a pretty solid kart racer, especially for small children who might have difficulty with the Mario Karts and CTRs of the world, the lack of content makes it pretty difficult to recommend. I don't like bringing up the price in reviews much since prices for games fluctuate so much, but this game launched at $40. This is the same price as CTR and Team Sonic Racing, games which are much better in terms of gameplay, content, and production, and available on all of the same systems. It's not a complete disaster, but the lack of content makes it hard to recommend for its target audience, and the off-putting license makes it impossible to recommend to anybody else.