Actually a realistic Kart Racing game for a change | First Impressions - Street Kart Racing

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Street Kart Racing is not your typical Kart Racing game, it doesn’t feature arcade controls, power-ups, whimsical characters, and third person camera. Instead, it is a racing-sim in the likes of Gran Turismo or Assetto Corsa. That means first-person driving camera, realistic driving physics, photorealistic visuals, and  pure racing gameplay.

Starting the game, I was welcomed by real life racing superstar Nico Rosberg and a tutorial section which got me up to speed with the controls and how the game works. The game is just a simple no nonsense racing game; accelerate, turn corners, and get ahead of the competition to win races.

While the controls are pretty straightforward, winning actual races is hard. Cornering is tough, and you can easily spin the kart out of control if you’re not careful. It’s not all unforgiving though, as you can easily call a marshall to “reset the vehicle” if you somehow mess up and get stuck. Instead of being hyper realistic with this, it now just takes you a few seconds to reset and get back into the race. When you’re ahead by a huge margin, this won’t even let opponents catch you.

There are various control schemes to use: pure touchscreen, using the phone’s gyro controls like a steering wheel, inverted touch controls, and even the option to use physical controllers like the PS4 and Xbox types. Personally, I selected the Tilt (Pro) as it is the recommended one, to get an immersive feeling of having to use a steering wheel.

Street Kart Racing also features real-life tracks, with real-time weather supposedly matching their real life counterparts. As expected, the weather will affect the handling and driving of the Karts, adding a lot of immersion to the driving-sim experience.

The whole gameplay loop if the game is to win races, therefore gaining currency when the event ends after real-time hours or minutes. Then proceeding to enter new classes and more expensive and faster Karts. While it is multiplayer focused, the majority of my time was spent racing with AI which are always readily available to match up against. Only the lap and times matter, and that will get compared to other players in an asynchronous multiplayer setup.

So far, Street Kart Racing looks like an interesting game for $5, but there is a time currency energy system and P2W in-app purchases that might alienate players looking to get their money's worth. Still, if you're looking for a genuine Kart Racing-sim on iOS, this might be worth a try.