Zero Gear

My first thought booting up Zero Gear for the first time was that it feels more like a lost Micro Machines spiritual successor than any serious challenger to Nintendo's crown, and that framing actually works in its favor. The tracks are wide and forgiving, the kart handling uses a hop button for tighter corners, and the nitro boost you build by drafting or spinning mid-air keeps the pace snappy without demanding precision driving. It is genuinely easy to pick up, which means it clears the "four friends who haven't touched a racing game in years" accessibility bar with room to spare. The real personality lives outside the standard Race mode. Goal mode drops two teams into soccer, hockey, basketball, or football arenas and has you trying to muscle a comically oversized ball into a net with your kart, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Target mode has you launching your kart into scoring zones, and Sumo arenas task you with punching opponents over the edge using the boxing glove weapon before they do the same to you. The weapons list leans physical: the punching glove sends karts flying, sea mines detonate on contact, ice cubes freeze opponents in place, and the L.U.V. Bot is a love-seeking homing robot that latches onto targets. Tornadoes and repulsor shields round out a set that is fun in bursts, if not deep enough for long-term variety. The physics engine, built on Bullet, gives every collision a satisfying bounciness that still holds up for a game from 2010. Here is the honest conversation you need to have before buying: the online multiplayer is functionally dead. Peak concurrent players hover around one at any given time. The game lives and dies on its multiplayer, and that multiplayer requires either a very cooperative friends list or blind luck to find a lobby. The bot AI in solo mode is easy enough to feel like padding, and the single-player experience has no structured career or progression to speak of. Controller support is only partial, with menus still preferring a mouse, and the control rebinding options are limited enough to cause minor frustration on gamepad. Customisation is a bright spot. The garage lets you mix and match characters, hats, accessories, karts, and wheel types, with up to four color slots per item. There are 45 achievements, and most of them are completable against bots in solo play, so the achievement hunters in your group have a legitimate reason to return. The open scripting system also theoretically allows community-made maps and modes, though at this point the modding scene is as quiet as the servers. The honest verdict here is that Zero Gear is a budget-tier party game that had a genuinely good idea at its core. Grab it at its deeply discounted price if you have a group willing to commit to a private lobby session. The Goal and Sumo modes specifically are the kind of dumb fun that produces genuine screaming-at-the-screen moments. But buying it hoping to find strangers online in 2026 is wishful thinking, and solo play runs out of steam fast.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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