Entering VR Karts’ Colourful World Of Virtual Reality Racing

VR Karts is one of those games where the title tells you everything you need to know. It’s a colourful karting game that’s been built from the ground up for virtual reality.

Popping the headset on and sitting down to play, it all feels very intuitive. You’re sat in this trailer, and looking around moves the dot at the centre of the screen in order to select from the handful of options available to you. It’s a piece of cake to quickly hop into the tutorial – if you really feel that you must – or dive straight into a race or a championship. At the same time, it’s quite cute that you can lean down and peer at you racer’s head in the wing mirror.

The karting is really easy to pick up and play as well, with nice arcade handling, though it’s very easy be spun out during contact with another player. One thing that stands out, though, are the boost pick ups dotted around each track. These fill a blue meter on the kart’s dash in front of you, and it’s obviously a resource that you’ll need to manage, but that’s doubly true when it’s also by boosting that you’re able to drift around corners. Suddenly there’s a different attitude needed, to try and preserve boost for those tricky corners instead of using it up as soon as you get it.

Of course, no karting game would be complete without a litany of weapons to hurl at your enemies. Cannily, Viewpoint Games have made use of the latent aiming ability in the headset’s motion tracking in order to point at an enemy before firing. All of the offensive weapons are aimed and fired in this way, tracking to their target.

There’s a decent mixture of weapons, with your standard homing missile and spike strip joined by the more unusual beehive that gets dropped on the other player’s head, restricting their view to a tiny circle and forcing them to try and shake it off. I dreaded being hit by the bees, just for the effort and the unnerving experience of shaking my head with a few hundred quid of headset strapped to my face.

Viewpoint are a small team of four, which explains the limited number of environments and similar feeling tracks in the game. There’s a chunky and brightly coloured cartoony art style to the game, as fits the genre, but there’s just two environments. Even then, Castle and Valley could easily be mistaken for one another, and the dozen tracks will start to blend into one across the three championships of rising difficulty. A beach environment is on the way, but I hope that they can go even further in future.

A major plus side to the art style is how easily it can scale up and down. With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive launches – the game can be bought in Early Access, ahead of a full release some time in the “launch window” – all of the systems running this game will have no problem in meeting the 90 frames per second it demands, but the art style will work just as well on the PlayStation 4, and even fits with only minor adjustments onto the Gear VR.

VR Karts: Sprint has been out on Gear VR since the middle of last year, and features bespoke tracks and a cut down number of racers, from eight to six. It runs really well, and feels practically the same as the full game on PC, right down to having working wing mirrors to keep tabs on what’s behind you. The one caveat is that you need a bluetooth controller in order to actually play the game.

One thing that it’s really going to miss out on is the purity of playing against someone sat right next to you. I did actually get to play a semblance of local multiplayer, by virtue of there being a pair of PCs set up alongside one another, but for the 99.9% of people buying a VR headset, they’ll only be buying the one and LAN parties aren’t all that likely to happen. You might get a taste of this with the Gear VR’s portability, but VR is a naturally rather isolated experience, so the game focuses on having up to eight player mulitplayer over the internet.

It has a simple matchmaking system, where you can sit and send set little text messages back and forth, but it’s really all about getting out there and onto the track. Unfortunately, with only two players, it feels empty and the portal pick up is massively overpowered, allowing you to jump forward half a lap and is designed for full groups of players. It feels like an oversight not to be able to mix in some AI racers, so that there’s a little more action on track and to add a little longevity to the game’s online lifespan.

There’s a few other quirks to the game, where I wish there was more of a visual indication that an attack was incoming, but overall, VR Karts gets the fundamentals of karting and virtual reality right. No, it’s not going to knock Mario Kart of its perch any time soon, but this could be a good, family friendly introduction to VR or make for a nice change of pace from intense space dogfighting.