Way. Too. Much. Going. On. – KartRider Rush+ Review

It’s. Racing game, it’s a clan war, it’s a house resource management game, it is a career mode, it’s collection based, it has a story mode... This game is trying to be all things for all people and it is utterly overwhelming. There are no less than _six_ distinct kinds of currency (possibly more depending on how you think about it) all of which are earned separately and spent distinctly. BIGGEST ISSUE: The game clock is set to California time, not your local time. There are quests and challenges which have to be done at fixed times of day. For many of us, these are in the middle of the night. Ranked play doesn’t begin until LUNCHTIME. If you’re going to fix the game clock to a time zone, UTC-8 may be the least fair to everyone else who isn’t from California you can possibly choose. Pro: they are actively trying to manage cheating and the racing against others feels much more fair than most phone games The aesthetic is consistent and well executed The physics engine is good On the whole the actual racing is a ton of fun even against other people Con: The left and right steering buttons are next to each other and very close resulting in a lot of misfired commands. A sweep zone would allow a lot more control and precision which the game requires The story mode is totally disconnected from everything else and many of the races require levels of expertise well beyond reasonable expectations given progress across all other fronts (for example suddenly expecting no fewer than 18 wall taps on two long laps of a track one has never seen before which is narrow, has a lot of jagged edges independent of the flow of the circuit all while trying to come in first and under a specific time when the race prior was simply “come in first” on this track you’ve seen again and again) It is often completely unclear which cart is “best” for a given race. Some are shown for item races and some for speed, but if all your item carts really stink, you’re still better off with a good speed cart in an item race. Comparing side by side stats is impossible making it hard to know when one cart has surpassed another in apparent value For time trials the ghost is your own previous best time, not the current #1. Learning the “right” way to optimize each track is thus basically impossible. You’ll never learn the short cuts or where/how to build boost quickly because there’s no way to watch superior racers do it “right”. There’s just way too much going on. You spend most of your time manically trying to ensure you aren’t leaving money on the table by overlooking some quest or challenge instead of just enjoying the racing
Review by JimJohnMarks on KartRider Rush+.