Race your friends in SuperTuxKart, a free, open-source kart racing game! It even supports a Danish language option.
If you’ve ever owned a Nintendo console, you’ve probably played one of the Mario Kart games. SuperTuxKart is a similar experience you can download completely free. It comes with a ton of characters and tracks to try, and you can race both offline and online against others. Plus, it’s available for most operating systems and mobile devices!
On this page, you’ll find plenty of information about SuperTuxKart, including our thoughts after a quick test on a PC running Windows 11 Home. If you’d also like to try other games, we highly recommend checking out the Games category here on Holyfile, which you can find at this link.
Availability, languages, and installation
SuperTuxKart is available for almost every platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. There’s even a version for Nintendo Switch, but it requires hacking your Switch before you can install it, which we do not recommend. Instead, we recommend downloading it for your computer.
When you click the download button here on Holyfile, you’ll be sent to the game’s official website, so you get exactly the file that matches your operating system. If you want to read more about SuperTuxKart’s system requirements, that information is available in the official FAQ, which you can find by clicking here.
There’s even an option to play SuperTuxKart in Danish! In the in-game settings, you can browse the available languages and select the one you prefer.
Here on Holyfile, we ran a quick SuperTuxKart test on Windows. We tested the game on a PC with Windows 11 Home installed. The Windows installer is about 600 MB, and your download time will of course depend on your internet speed. After that, just double-click the file and install the game, as shown in the GIF above.
Different characters
While SuperTuxKart may remind you of Nintendo’s Mario Kart, you’ll quickly notice it’s very much its own game. SuperTuxKart doesn’t revolve around Mario but features Tux, the famous Linux penguin. There are plenty of other playable characters too, such as Adiumy and Wilber, clearly drawn from other open-source projects. Wilber, for example, is the mascot from the GIMP image editor.
As with many racers, each character has a unique kart with different attributes. In SuperTuxKart, karts vary by weight, top speed, acceleration, and nitro efficiency.
At first, it won’t matter much which character you pick, but once you get good at SuperTuxKart, you can choose the character and kart that best match your playstyle. That way you can improve even more and beat your own track records.
How to play
So how do you play SuperTuxKart? The best way for new players to start is by running the tutorial track. It explains how to steer, use items, boost with nitro, and more.
To sum up the basics, you steer with the arrow keys. Press Up to accelerate and Down to brake. You can see the default key bindings in the image below.
Along the way, you can pick up boxes containing different items. Activate items with the Spacebar. You can also collect nitro on the track and trigger it for extra speed by pressing the N key. Drifting grants additional acceleration as well, which you do with the V key.
Game modes and online play
SuperTuxKart offers a lot of different modes. While some will feel familiar, there are also modes you won’t typically find in Nintendo’s racers.
The available modes include: Normal Race, Time Trial, Follow the Leader, Battle, Soccer, Egg Hunt, and Ghost Replay races. You can also choose Story Mode to play through a campaign.
For example, we haven’t seen an Egg Hunt in similar kart racers. We’re not sure it’s a must-have mode for the genre, but it’s interesting that you can try it here.
It’s also worth noting that SuperTuxKart supports online play. We didn’t test this part, since we chose to race offline only in our SuperTuxKart review, but if you want to play over the internet you’ll need to create an account. To do that, choose a username and password and provide your email address.
Our verdict
Overall, we at Holyfile are big fans of SuperTuxKart. It’s seriously impressive that such a polished game can be both free and open-source at the same time. It costs nothing and is available on virtually every platform — and it even supports Danish.
Is it as good as, say, Mario Kart? Probably not, and it’s a bit unfair to make that comparison anyway when many consider Mario Kart one of the most iconic kart racers ever. SuperTuxKart isn’t made by a giant company like Nintendo, so you shouldn’t expect the same level of polish. That said, SuperTuxKart is packed with fun characters and varied modes, making it an interesting alternative kart racer we definitely think is worth a try.
If SuperTuxKart sounds like a fun little game, we highly recommend downloading it!
Download SuperTuxKart
