Tech Olive

When we first heard of Zero Gear, we were pleasantly surprised. From early previews, it was hard to believe that someone was finally making a Mario Kart-themed racer. It seemed that they captured what made Mario Kart great and managed to bring it to gamers with a fresh look and design. Like Mario Kart, Zero Gear focuses heavily on combat and weapons to win the race. However, it does offer more than just circuit-race gametypes.

Zero Gear offers several gametypes of varying difficulty and style, ensuring that there’s most likely something for everyone.  The gametypes are Tag (Become “it” and your points will slowly go up, most points at the end wins), Target (Launch off ramps and try to land in high-scoring point zones) and Goal (Two teams trying to push an over-sized ball into the other team’s goal), accompanied by traditional circuit races to keep you busy. One of the gameplay mechanics that really drew me in was the customization options for your vehicle of choice and the driver within. You have a ton of hilarious and awesome choices for driver apparel and car details/designs. Making my driver and car alone kept me busy for nearly an hour.

Surprisingly, Zero Gear defaults to a keyboard-style control system, which — as any racing game fan will know — is a terrible means of playing a racing game. Even the Xbox 360 controller for PC needed to be manually configured. While this isn’t terrible, it is quite an annoyance.

While Zero Gear is an impressive homage to everyone’s fond memories of Mario Kart, the game sometimes makes it hard to overlook some of its issues and ends up mostly serving as a nice time-waster at best. For a game that relies on the physics so much, the physics engine is often very annoying and random. With a few random fatal crashing errors every few hours, it makes it hard to justify the game’s price. Not to say that it’s over-priced, but when your alternative is the completely free TrackMania Nations — while not weapon-based and still restricted to traditional racing modes, it’s easy to completely forget about Zero Gear. But, if you’re still determined to try Zero Gear out for yourself, grab the demo on Steam.

Overall: 6 Olives