Kartrider Rush+ is a mobile racing game that reminded me of Mario Kart Tour in a good way; While being a hundred percent bogged down by microtransactions, superfluous systems and other free to play mechanics, I felt like the handling and feel of the game was pretty good here and the racing was actually fun and reminded me of ‘classic’ Mario Kart games. This is too bad, considering how everything else around the core systems seemed to be here to bring it down.
At its core, the gameplay of Kartrider Rush+ is fairly simple. You have a left and right button on-screen that you can use to steer and drift in combination with a drift button. You can tap the screen to build up small mini-boosts and use power-ups and items like nitro and missiles with specific on-screen buttons. This works fairly well, even tho I never managed to 100% get good at drifting and would sometimes get stuck the wrong way and needed to restart the race. The races are quite short but you do a few laps on them and there are different objectives like collecting coins that gives the game a bit of variety.
Around this interesting-but-imperfect core driving experience you’ll bet daily login rewards, daily quests, levels - complete with unlocks - new vehicles and characters you’ll get for a limited number of days, a story mode with a billion of different currencies to gather while you try to complete quests in each levels to get the maximum amount of stars, it’s all too much. I just want to race karts and play multiple races in a row. I don’t want to have to go through five different menus every time to collect my rewards and get a slightly better kart that gives me +5% to drift nitro bonus. Then the game unlocked some kind of house decorating mode where I could buy furniture and decorations to create some kind of personalized social hub. I just wanted to race karts.
Kartrider Rush+ isn’t too bad if you can stomach everything around the core gameplay - and even then, its free to play nature seeps into these mechanics as well - I at least enjoyed it a bit more than that mobile Mario Kart game, which doesn’t say much. If you are specifically looking for one of these on mobile, I’d say to give this one a look!
