Kartzoom: cliffs, gliders and four very different karts
The farm got a volcano, a lagoon with sharks in it and a frozen ravine — and when you go off the edge, your kart puts its wings out.
Kartzoom is a farmyard kart racer that opens in the tab you are already in. Three circuits, eight karts on the grid, cowpats and hay bales to throw at whoever is winning. This is the biggest update it has had, and most of it is about the ground under you.
The circuits got bigger, and they got a drop
Every circuit is wider and straighter than it was. That sounds like a downgrade and it is the opposite: the karts are much faster now, and a corner that was fun at a hundred was simply a wall at two hundred. There is more road to use, more room to go side by side into a corner, and more chance of surviving a mistake.
Each circuit also has a cliff.
Sunflower Circuit runs up onto the flank of a volcano and drops into the caldera. Muddy Bottom leaps a lagoon with sharks in it, which lunge at you as you pass and never quite reach. Frostfield crosses a frozen ravine. In each case the road simply ends, and the next piece of road is a long way down and a long way ahead.
You do not press anything to glide
Go off a cliff and your kart deploys a glider. There is no button and no timing to learn: if the ground is far enough below you, the wings come out, and they fold away when you land. Steer while you are up there and you will change where you come down by a considerable margin.
The camera pulls back and lifts while you are gliding, so you can see the landing rather than the underside of your own kart. It eases in and out rather than cutting, which matters more than it sounds when you are trying to line up a landing at speed.
Gliding is also where the four characters start to feel properly different, because how fast you arrive at the lip decides how far you get.
Four karts, not one kart in four colours
Every driver now has their own machine, and you can tell them apart from behind at racing speed, which is the only view that matters.
Bramble the sheep drives the Woolpacker, the balanced one and the easiest to learn. Kettle the chicken has the Cluckcannon: narrow, absurdly tall, tiny front wheels and huge rears, furious off the line and out of ideas at the top end. Dozer the cow drives the Bulldozer, the widest thing on the grid, with a bull bar and two outboard exhaust stacks and no rear wing at all. Truffle the pig has the Mudlark, long and low with the back track wider than the front, and it will hold a slide longer than anything else out there.
The shapes follow the statistics rather than decorating them. The heavier a kart, the wider it sits. The quicker off the line, the bigger the difference between its front and rear tyres. If a kart looks like it should be good at something, it is.
Dust, smoke and the marks you leave
Drift and you now lay rubber on the road and trail smoke off the back tyres. Go off onto the dirt and you pull up dust behind you, and the dust is the right colour for the circuit you are on. Fire a mini-turbo and the exhaust does something about it.
None of that changes how the karts handle. All of it makes it much easier to read what the kart in front is doing, which does change how you race.
On a phone, you can see the controls now
The touch controls used to be invisible regions of the screen with three words of text over them. There is now a steering wheel that turns as you steer, an accelerator that presses, and clear buttons for drifting and for the item you are holding.
The steering has not changed underneath. Your thumb still lands anywhere on the left and slides; the wheel is there to show you what you are doing, not to be aimed at. A wheel you have to hit accurately is much worse on a phone than a region you cannot miss.
Where to start
Sunflower Circuit, Bramble, three laps. Hold the accelerator, take the wide line, and drift the slow left at the back of the lap until the sparks turn colour — that is your turbo, and it is the whole game in one corner. Then go and find the volcano.
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