Retro Kart Rush

Genre: Kart Racer

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Retro Kart Rush is a Kart Racer released in 2022 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players race as various animals driving go-karts Mario Kart style, and by that I mean the original Super Mario Kart, as the game is styled to look like the first game to kick off both that series and the genre.

To be clear, Retro Kart Rush is a 3D game, albeit one that uses flat pixel art characters for its racers. However, it does a wonderful job replicating the look of a classic “Mode 7”-style faux 3D game from the early 16-bit era, albeit in a somewhat generic way. Unfortunately, there’s a major issue here – the game has some horrible framerate drops, despite everything about the game being so simple and retro in style that there’s really no excuse for it here.

Things get even worse when you look at the gameplay. Once again, on the surface everything looks good, if a bit simple. The controls and mechanics here are pretty standard for the genre, even tossing in Mario Kart’s signature drifting spark-boost system. Unfortunately, Retro Kart Rush also copies Super Mario Kart’s terrible rubber-banding, and in fact it is far worse in this game.

With Retro Kart Rush’s graphics issues and rubber-banding, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone looking for a Kart Racer, especially when its clear inspiration is easily playable on the Nintendo Switch already, and is a far, far superior game. And that’s if you’re looking for something retro – Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is of course also on the Nintendo Switch, and still in my opinion the best game in the genre. Just play one of those games instead.

tl;dr – Retro Kart Rush is a Kart Racer that imitates the style of the classic Super Nintendo entry in the Mario Kart series. Unfortunately, this game suffers from nasty slowdown issues, as well as some atrocious rubber-banding. As a result, there’s just no reason to play this game instead of one of the Mario Kart games already available on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: D+

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