Yeah it was fun! It gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it’s ideal if you have limited time. I mean, one single race takes 2 minutes tops.
What was the most fun for me was learning and beating the arcade mode (basically races where you have limited time to reach the checkpoints). It was a good challenge.
What it lacks is a car damage system and a bigger difference between different cars and terrain/weather conditions. It’s minimal as of now.

The premise is that I haven’t properly played a Pokemon game since Pokemon Gold on my Game Boy more than 20 (fuck..) years ago. So I probably can’t make a good comparison. What I can tell you is that it felt different, since I didn’t get a feeling of nostalgia like I did with Coromon, for example (which you could object is too similar for that matter. Weird chance that I decided to play both games this month).
It has many original ideas. Some of them fall a bit short, maybe, like the whole monster fusion system, since you can’t explore it properly if you just follow the main story. I also can see that they put some effort into the combat system, trying to make something unique, but to be honest I ended up using the same two monsters for the entirety of the game, and the same 4-5 moves too (I played on normal difficulty). So yeah, there’s that. Also I didn’t particularly like the monster design.
What I liked the most was the level design, the exploration, the mood the game sets with its story and music. The whole monster-collecting part ended up being of secondary importance to me, as weird as it may sound.