The most mediocre kart racing game I've ever played. The only reason I even played this is because me and some friends wanted a kart racing game as a pastime until Party Animals released, and this was readily available, for free.

While I had fun with my friends (Entirely due to my friends), it's a dull and emotionless experience otherwise. I felt nothing while playing this, and I always feel something when playing videogames. Controls are not bad enough to be funny, but are also not good enough to be enjoyable, and most of the time it feels painfully slow, even when going objectively fast, which is a major problem for a racing game.

Everything else is equally as mediocre. Decent graphics but a boring art style, so it looks fine but nothing special. If there even was any music, it didn't make its presence known, or it's that forgettable.

Funnily enough, I haven't even mentioned this game's worst problem: It's intrinsically and completely pay-to-win. That's right, you can buy the in-game currency to just max out your kart, and crush everyone else. So not only is this game boring, it's also unfair, though we rarely lost because the game is so dead that the few remaining players sucked and the other racers were bots.

Anyway, avoid this, go play something else that isn't a waste of your time, lest this game empties you too.

SCORE: 5/10

Couldn't really get into this one, unfortunately. To be honest, I couldn't tell you exactly why this didn't click with me, especially since I do really enjoy the series' mobile entry, KartRider Rush+, but I just wasn't really enjoying it very much and ended up deleting it.

Maybe the gameplay just doesn't translate particularly well to PlayStation 4 or something, but I felt that Rush+ was a lot more enjoyable all around. Something about KartRider: Drift just feels off to me. It felt slower, somehow less responsive despite using a controller instead of a touch screen, and overall there's just not a whole lot going on here, both in terms of its racing and its live-service elements. There's not many events or things to progress towards, whereas Rush+ feels like it's constantly popping off with something new to do.

It also seems like there's just absolutely no playerbase here. When I set it to only match me up with real players, I only ever got into one, single race after over four and a half minutes straight of waiting, and never got into another race after that. And this is with cross-platform play activated, mind you. Last time I played Rush+, I consistently found full-house races within 30 seconds, even when I was up in the higher ranked tiers. That just leaves you with racing against the CPU-controlled racers... who just blast off the starting line at top speed and never let up. I just can't catch up to them, no matter what I do. I don't know if it's a personal skill issue or if these bastards just cheat, but I was never able to finish ahead of... like, 6th place. So the choice is between trying to get multiplayer races in a game seemingly nobody is playing, or try and race against CPUs I have no realistic chance of catching up to. Either way, I'm not having fun, so I just stopped bothering with this.


The game has good qualities, such as its robust, ModNation Racers-esque suite of car customization features, wide variety of tracks, karts and characters and beautiful visuals, but when I'm not having much fun with the actual racing, I'm not gonna stick around for much time at all. It's a shame, because I really do like Rush+; unfortunately, this game failed to live up to that.

KartRider Drift is an online cross-platform free-to-play kart game like many others, which tries to replicate a gameplay similar to Mario Kart and similar games.

The game can be played against bots or other players from any other platform available. The overall look and tracks are fantastic and the game doesn't force you into microtransactions as the kart itself and its driver are just for appearance. The in-game currency are earned as you play the game, that currency can be used to buy in-game items and to upgrade your kart to make your kart faster and more stable, but apart from that there isn't a complex upgrade system, the game just gives you several upgrade points to boost the stats.
The good thing about this game is the possiblity to play with either bots or other players and from almost every platform and the negatives are pretty obvious. The game doesn't offer anything outstanding, the game is similar and more basic in terms of gameplay and variety than other non free-to-play kart game like Mario Kart, Sonic&Sega All-Stars Racing, Crash Team Racing,... The game is mainly about racing and picking items around the map and using them against others.

All in all a great free-to-play for kart enthusiast and for those who aren't in this type of game, and are willing to try it before investing money in more popular kart games. This game doesn't have much content at the moment and the gameplay is really basic in my opinion, I love the tutorials and track variety but it doesn't have that something that outstands from other kart games and what makes it recognizable.

Fun for a bit every now and then, but most of the tracks are pretty boring in design.

A few new tracks are trying new designs so it's showing promise, but the majority of the tracks are still pretty unexciting.

I don't think it holds up to previous games, sadly. Especially the one released like a decade+ ago that never got out of beta in the west (I think it was called just KartRider)