Nexon America announced during this past year’s X019 event that the popular kart racing game that took China by storm, KartRider: Drift, will be making its way West come December 5th, next month.
The game will be made available on PC via Steam and on the Xbox One with a closed beta test set to take place over the weekend. The beta will also be cross-play enabled, allowing PC gamers and Xbox gamers to play together. Nexon also announced that KartRider: Drift will support the Xbox One X with 4K output.
The game originally launched way back in 2004 in South Korea, but grew over time and spread throughout Asia, amassing more than 380 million registered users. They’re now attempting to spread even further by introducing the free-to-play racing game to Westerners, specifically on Steam and Xbox One.
You can check out the trailer below to get an idea of what the revamped version of the game looks like.
I have to be honest. That’s a really darn good looking trailer. The colors pop in all the right places, and the visuals have an inviting aesthetic to them.
The game comes with three different play modes, including the Speed Mode, where skill reigns supreme; Item Mode, where you utilize arcade-style tactics to out-race and out-item your opponents; and the Time Attack mode, where you attempt to post the best lap times on the leaderboards against players from all over the world.
In addition to localizing the game for the West, they also took the liberty of designing all new karts, creating brand new tracks, implementing new kart skins, and optimizing the game for higher-end systems.
There’s also a lot of customizable parts you can unlock in order to personalize your racer and their kart.
This is probably one of the rare X019 reveals that wasn’t filled with the typical “diversity” propaganda we’ve seen in other Xbox titles, and it just seemed to get straight to the point and focus on the racing and the gameplay. Then again that’s probably because Asians made it instead of San Francisco hipsters.
In any case, you can look for the closed beta test to get underway during the first week of December. Unfortunately for Xbox One gamers, you will need an active Xbox Live Gold subscription in order to play this free-to-play racing title, meaning it’s not so free on Xbox compared to PC.
For more info feel free to visit the official website.