Most if not all of my kart combat experience involves firing red turtles and speeding around corners with Toad in the Mario Kart series. The genre made sense on consoles as what made the experience long lasting was the addicting multiplayer both racing and battling it out with your friends.

Nimblebit has gone out on a limb to bring these concepts and more to the PC through the use of online multiplayer in its kart racer Zero Gear. Does the effort achieve its goal or does it fall short?

Gameplay

Once you get onto the courses there’s plenty of options, but before you even roll out, you can hit the garage which offers an impressive amount of customization for your driver and kart.

In race mode, as expected, the goal is to finish your laps first. A smattering of creative power-ups including tornadoes and love-seeking L.U.V. Bots are scattered across the course and can be used against opposing players to gain the upper-hand. Getting a feel for how to drive, slide, in some cases flip-around and just gaining full control of my handling took a bit, but once I figured it out I found it was all smiles from there. Especially as I found the variety of modes included.

Nimblebit made a smart move to go away from what we’ve already experienced with kart combat, instead looking to integrate sports games and other activities into the gameplay. Thus fun and addicting modes like Goal and Tag were created, I particularly enjoyed the soccer level which had players fighting for control over an over-sized ball in order to “kick” it into the opposing player/team’s goal, I can only describe it as frenzied fun. You’ll have to rely on several tactics, including ignoring bigger goals to take care of smaller ones that demand your more immediate attention, such as taking out the ass-hat who keeps bumping you.

Being that the game is on PC, it’s simply impractical for a local co-op feature. Which is too bad as the game is made for it, hopefully it makes it to consoles at some point and includes the feature. It fits into the ‘game-o-screws’ type that’s so successful in that setting.

Style

The levels are vibrant and colorful and the courses just has an overall nice, smooth look to them. The customization I mentioned earlier deserves to be brought up again for the style section, It’s a nice touch to be able to have a highly customized rider for the multiplayer-heavy title, since the game naturally lacks local co-op, players will only know you by two things: your tag and your look.

Story

As with most racing combat titles, Zero Gear’s story takes a backseat, if it exists at all, to its style and gameplay.

Everything Else

Nimblebit has provided the game with excellent post-launch support, adding a new race map, sumo mode and Xbox 360 controller support to date.

The title runs $20 on Steam with a four-pack deal running just $40, cutting the cost in half if you have a trio of friends/gift receivers.