At the start of a race, for example, your kart will rattle and then stall, prompting your avatar to smack the engine. Visually, MK2 isn’t going to knock off socks, pop eyes or drop jaws, but the character designs are cute and the animation is respectable. With a little practice, even novices should be able to powerslide around corners with ease. On the contrary, certain surfaces, such as ice and dirt, require more finesse, although not so much inexperienced players will find themselves slipping and sliding all over the tracks. That doesn’t mean you can mash the “up” key and expect to win, though. Rather, the developers ignored the notion of realistic driving mechanics and went for tight, accessible controls. Poor controls can ruin an otherwise good racing game, but that doesn’t happen in MK2. During two-player races, the second participant uses the WASD keys to steer and Shift to trigger power-ups. The Spacebar activates the current power-up, which I’ll get to in a moment. Not to worry it took me just a few seconds to figure out the single-player controls: “up” for accelerate, “left” and “right” to turn, and “down” to brake. When you load MK2 for the first time, you might be tempted to poke around for instructions, but you won’t find any. You even run into trouble when you stray off course, with off-road driving being much slower than on the track. It’s apparent a lot of thought went into creating the courses, which are spot on in terms of length and difficulty.Īs your kart travels over various surfaces, the sound effects change accordingly. The fourth track is filled with road hazards, tight turns and shifting scenery, requiring you to let off the accelerator a bit and steer more cautiously. The curved hills that make up the first course, for instance, are almost ingenious for their ability to throw you off center. The course design is one of the highlights of MK2. For example, the winter course is more slippery than the others because of the ice that coats its roads, while the island track has water hazards that can slow you down.

While the characters are based on a generic template, each track has unique qualities that separate it from the others. This eclectic assortment races through eight environments, including a winter wonderland, an island, a factory, a mine, a castle, a swamp and more. At the onset of MK2, you can choose to play as any one of these characters, although the decision is aesthetic, as there’s no discernible difference between them.

Instead of providing a scrolling narrative or a goofy announcer, the game lets you decide how two chickens, a pair of frogs, a mouse, a snowman and an anthropomorphic pumpkin find themselves at the starting line of a kart racing competition. In MK2, the characters are the back story. Like Mario Kart and other similar offerings, the measure of any racing game’s worth can be found in a few basic criteria, including track design, graphics and controls, characters and environments. Moorhuhn Kart 2 is an arcade racer starring the crazy chicken Moorhuhn, who has appeared in more than 20 self-titled casual games spanning genres from Mah Jong to Soccer.

Moorhuhn winter games