Stampede: Racing Royale turns Mario Kart into a battle royale | Digital Trends

As revealed at this year’s PC Gaming Show, Stampede: Racing Royale is a new kart racer coming to PC early access this year and consoles late on. It’s not just any kart racer though: It’s a 60-player battle royale game.

The project is being developed by Sumo Lemmington, a new studio within Sumo Digital. Sumo has quite the racing game pedigree, as its responsible for Outrun (2006) and the Sonic All -Stars Racing series. It even acted as a support studio on 2021’s excellent Forza Horizon 5. Stampede: Racing Royale continues that strong racing game track record.

Stampede includes all the fundamentals of the kart racing genre, including drifting and items, but adds in its own twist. It’s a mass-multiplayer elimination game where players compete in three rounds, which rotate between game types. The first round has 60 players competing. Then the herd thins to 40 and then 20 before one racer is crowned champion.

At a hands-on demo session before PC Gaming Show, a developer from Sumo described it as “Fall Guys meets Mario Kart,” and that’s a succinct pitch. In the rounds I played, I ran through a few fast-paced races with 59 CPU players all duking it out on wide, winding tracks. It had the same chaotic fun as Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout as I scrambled to stay at the top of the pack.

I only got a glimpse of some of the other rounds. One is a spin on Mario Kart’s battle mode, where players are tossed into an arena and must nail each other with items to get points. Sumo says the game is filled with creative modes like that, which rotate in and out during a round.

It will launch as a free-to-play game, complete with purchasable cosmetics. It seems like it’ll have some form of battle pass too, based on some UI that I noticed in the build I played. Sumo notes that it’ll operate as a full live-service game too, with seasons, events, and frequent updates.

Stampede: Racing Royale is set to launch in early access on PC this year, with Steam playtests planned this summer. Console versions are planned, but Sumo has yet to confirm which platforms it’s targeting.

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