Everyone likes good ol Mario Kart right? For now, this next title should do.

Krazy Kart Racers ($2.99)

How many kart racers are in store? And of those how many are playable online? Konami attempts to answer both those questions with Krazy Kart. It’s the closest thing we’ll get to Mario Kart, but does it stand on its own?

Presentation

Krazy Kart has lots of modes, and lots of locations to play with. Each level is a different location and are differently themed. You can either be in a creepy old castle, or in the Arctic ice-cold winter. The 3D graphics are top-notch. The graphics vary by the worlds you chose, and as you progress, the tracks get more complicated.

Sometimes it’s a bit more tough: you have to use the speed-up power-up to slightly jump up a bit and get onto the raised surface (which is a shortcut ). As you play the tracks there are also nice visual effects (such as dust when you drift, fire when you fall in the lava, etc.). Each track looks great and there are lots of racers to choose from.

Controls

There are two control methods. There’s gyro, which is my personal favorite. Tilt to steer, tap the brake, and tap the action button to use a power-up. The other control method is touch. In this mode, you can tap on the steering wheel on the left and drag it left and right to steer. Again, tap the brake button to brake and the action button to use a power-up. No matter what mode you choose though, they both have auto-accelerate.

Gameplay

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the point of the game is to race to the finish line (and do laps) and be #1 . Seriously though, Krazy Kart keeps you entertained while doing this. You can pick the difficulty of the racers to play against (from toddler level to pro ka-pow). As you go through the tracks, there are two different types of power-ups. The red power-ups are weapons are weapons. Use them to get missiles, shields, turn invisible, etc. These can be used to attack (and slow down) opponents or protect yourself from opponents attacks.The other type of power-ups are blue. Most (if not all) of the time this power-up is a speed boost. Also when you use the speed boost power-up, it makes your kart slightly jump. This is helpful on the later tracks when some of the shortcuts are slightly higher than the ground you’re on. You also have from more than 10 classic Konami game characters to use from.

Apart from the typical race (whether playing quick race or Krazy GP), Krazy Kart has several single player modes, 5 to be precise. One of them is mini battle. In mini battle, there are two mini-games to play (maybe more are unlocked as you play). The first is chicken. In chicken, your kart is accelerating straight towards the water. You cannot move or control the speed. The point of the game is to stop your kart (and not fall off the pier) but be the one who’s closest to the water. The other mini-game is Bomb Chaser. This mini-game can be described as tag basically. A driver will have a bomb attached to the car, and he must tag another driver to pass the bomb to him. You have a certain amount of time before the bomb blows so hurry!

The other two modes are familiar to anyone who’s ever played a kart racer or racer. “Trials” and “Time Attack”. And they work just as you would think they do. Once you finish a Krazy GP, you will unlock the Trials of that cup. Then you can go into Trials mode and play three challenges to unlock the next cup to play in Krazy GP mode. Last but not least is “Free Run” mode. I’m guessing this is to play one race only, as that’s what it seems to be.

Overall, Krazy Kart is packed with gameplay to keep you entertained for a long time. It also has multiplayer, both local and worldwide. Sadly though, just ignore that it has worldwide multiplayer. Why? Keep reading below.

Suggestions

So far I’m finding the game great. It’s currently the best kart racer in the AppStore. But it does have a big con: online multiplayer. It seems Konami teamed up with Polarbit to bring worldwide multiplayer to Krazy Kart, but this has failed. My experience with the worldwide multiplayer was horrible. First of all, it seems to only work at certain times.

On my iPod Touch I was not able to create a room, it would just crash the app. Luckily, James was able to. While playing, there was a bit of lag where James went extremely fast, and I started a few seconds after him, and of course lost. We were able to play a few races before the worldwide multiplayer went down. Though we have not tested it, local multiplayer seems to be working fine for people though.

Conclusion

Even with it’s multiplayer issue, I’m still liking the game. Personally, I look towards what you can do offline and on your own more than what you can do with Internet access (and hoping someone else is online). The thing is, there’s not a lot of kart racers on the AppStore. This being one of the few, it’s great. More over, the price tag has been greatly reduced, from $7.99 to $2.99 . We’re not sure if this is a limited time sale or the new permanent price tag for KK, but I highly recommend  you pick it up now cheap.

P.S: Like I pointed out in the preview, Konami has released Krazy Kart with having DLC packages. But not too worry, the game already has a lot of content, I’d be more than happy to pay for extra content.