Then you'll need to use the following techniques eventually:Īs someone who uses all these, I have to honestly say that other than cut charging, none of these mechanics are intuitive. In no other casual racing/kart game is basic drifting this difficult.

Touch a wall and you get stuck, rammed and more, risking a DNF. Drift improperly and it actually slows you down. Kartrider's drifting is seriously punishing. To get more nitro, you first need to drift well consistently, which is actually hard. Kartrider without boosters is slow, especially at this default speed. In 2023, we have less free time coupled with more distractions than ever, and if faced with unrewarding gameplay until you get good, most of us just go play a different game. But now as an adult? If nostalgia and muscle memory weren't factors, I probably would've dropped it after a few rounds. And almost two decades ago, I put in the time and effort to learn the mechanics because it was the only game I could play as a kid with a crap PC and no money. I'm playing this today because of nostalgia. Drifting in Kartrider is extremely finnicky and that letting go of shift does not correlate to ending a drift while pressing it for 1/10th of a second too long will make you oversteer is not very intuitive - it's a relic from 2004.Īnd that's a problem, because Kartrider without proper drifting is a mediocre and slow kart racer. Now, this may produce a chuckle in some of us, but truth be told, I can't fault him for it. Why risk colliding with a wall and coming to a halt? Just drive around it and settle with 5th place. He faceplanted into walls, DNF'd a couple times, and before he quit he did one thing: He drifted less.

I showed this game to my friend who plays Mario Kart and Forza casually, and seeing him fight the controls and physics really made me think about the new player experience. TL DR: Kartrider: Drift is still too difficult to get into, and I fear it will fail to attract a large playerbase.įrom the presentation, streamlined UI, international release, cross-platform play, to the monetization targeting a mass of users rather than a few whales - Kartrider: Drift to me seems like it wants to have mass appeal and bring in casual players.īut drifting properly, the bread and butter of Kartrider, is genuinely hard to learn. Really liking the game so far, but instead of talking about the usual content/speed/ping gripes I wanted to talk about a worry I developed while playing with a friend:

Context, I played OG KR as a child and I've been playing KRD for about two weeks.

Kartrider starting boost