While The Karters 2: Turbo Charged is a phenomenal (albeit flawed) kart racer with TONs of potential, I can only recommend this game to fans of Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled, fans of modding support in their games, and people who have friends that enjoy racing in private online lobbies away from the hardcore players. This is one of those games that greatly rewards the players that extensively grind and practice the mechanics, tracks, and jank, while HEAVILY punishing the players who do not invest enough time into the game compared to the small yet devoted playerbase.
With the game being inspired by CTR, the mechanics are a lot more complicated than your average item-based kart racer. The controls are easy and straight-forward to understand to the point that anyone can hop in and understand what does what and how to do it. Now, The Karters 2: Turbo Charged is a kart racer that aims to be a highly replayable kart racer with it's Steam Workshop modding support, even supporting 6-PLAYER split screen. This kart racer faulters to meet this goal by having a skill FLOOR so high makes a racer like The Karters 2 very hard to convince and jump into as opposed to the likes of Mario Kart or Sonic Racing, two games that are much easier to pick up and play.
Items are also a big factor that gives the genre it's identity. In The Karters 2's attempt to break the annoying tradition of being instantly stunned by projectile items, a Health system is present, where "weapons" deplete a health gauge, and when that gauge drops to zero, THEN you spin out and get stunned. While it's a unique idea that can reduce the chances of getting "Mario Karted", Stunning racers is what keeps the pack close together and prevents unfair breakaways, which is very common to happen with how large skill gaps can surprisingly be in this game's small player base. This makes it very hard to stop other racers from getting too far ahead and makes the multitude of offensive weapons feel nearly useless when used on other racers. Offensive weapons are often inferior to the large array of boost and shielding weapons that often counter the offensive weapons. The shield, and even the Heal Bot weapons prevent your HP from dropping to zero and spinning you out. Even the game's equivalent to a Spiny/Blue Shell--the Portal Gun, has TONs of ways to deflect it from slowing down the leading racer that NEEDS TO BE SLOWED DOWN, because again, more times than not, there WILL be a racer with more practice of the tracks, controls, and mechanics that WILL dominate the room and have an unfair, and more importantly, unfun breakaway. How is someone going to use a shotgun to stop a racer that's mastered building reserves to the point that they're checkpoints ahead of everyone else? What's the point of having an item/combat system in your game when the items cannot keep the racers in check before they're too far away to be touched. At that point there might as well not even be an item system if they items are THAT unhelpful.
Some will say "get good" or "just practice the tracks" but they fail to realize that some people don't have the time to practice as extensively as other people have. With there being an ever-growing roster of tracks on the Workshop, it would be nearly impossible to master every track for when twelve select tracks pulled randomly from the workshop are present for Online Matches. There's not really a lot of fun in a game that's meant to be replayable when you're required to practice tons of tracks and know how to traverse it's varying geometry to launch over turns, avoid in-descriptive out-of-bounds, and save time while still keeping reserves up to even stand a CHANCE. Because once you fall out of bounds experimenting with how you can save time and catch up, your race is already over with how SLOWLY you're dragged back to the map. I am aware that issue used to be MUCH WORSE in older versions of the game, but 2 seconds of respawn drag time is still a MASSIVE punishment for trying to shave a few seconds. It can be hard to tell in a custom track what is considered OoB or drivable, so being punished for going somewhere you didn't know you can go in a game that INCENTIVIZES you for flying around turns at high speed, with items like the Teleport Dash that helps and further encourages that experimentation, is not very fun. This especially when the time trial mode doesn't give you access to any Teleport Dashes or rewind features to practice specific sections of a track without restarting entirely. MARIO KART WORLD has this level of player-friendly track practicing. For a game as technical and overly-skill rewarding as the Karter's 2, it's beyond me why this hasn't been implemented in some fashion.
"Practice the mechanics", "get better at drifting", I said this game has a high skill floor, which means you'd need to be very good to do well against the basic CPUs, but when you got a drifting mechanic that has ZERO LIMITS to how fast you can go with the reserves you build with perfectly-executed drifts, the skill CEILING is as high as the players push it, so it's nearly endless. So when you go up against someone who has pushed that skill excessively, they'll reach speeds you cannot even fathom competing against. Now, when you spin out from losing all your HP, your reserves are reset. HOWEVER, as mentioned before, the offensive items are so ineffective that frontrunning players never have to worry about this because their too far ahead for lock-on items to reach them. So while they're safe from other players, they can continue building their lead with speed that has NO limit.
Accessibility greatly adds to a game's replay value. Its what makes games with modding support like Garry's Mod, Golf It, and Rivals of Aether have: accessibility for new/casual players. What makes a "Casual" (That's what it's listed as on Steam) kart-racer fun is when anyone can understand what to do and have a chance at winning, no matter the skill level. Sure, having more skill helps, but it shouldn't be to the point of an uncatchable breakaway that you can't do anything about. Even with the in-game accessibility options, Auto Acceleration and Steering Assist is NOT enough for a game like The Karter's 2, where it's most important drift mechanic is what will make or break a player's game experience. In the current state its in, The Karter's 2: Turbo Charged does NOT have the player-friendly accessible it needs to be a welcoming kart racers and stand the test of time like it hopes to do. It's too focused on demanding and rewarding high levels of play, which can really drive new players away from sinking anymore time into a game and really get into it, Because when I dug deeper, I had a blast playing solo and with friends. I just cannot see myself or anyone being easily able to introduce this game to their friends and be all "yeah, I understand what I need to do and how to do it." ESPECIALLY not 6 players on the same TV screen.
If the Karters 2: Turbo Charged wants to be the "casual" "replayable" kart racing experience it dreams to become, it needs to allow new players to compete in the same environment as experienced players and be able to stand a fighting chance. Otherwise people are going to quit and stop investing time into the game. If the game remains in this high-skill mindset, I cannot see the player base grow bigger and stay motivated to keep playing if they're unable to keep up with everyone else.
