Keyboard controls, hints and tips for keyboard play

some useful hints and tips for setting up a keyboard for the game, and some useful tips on how to control drifting for each machine and other little tips for those of us without controllers.

intro

Hi all! First off i want to say thankyou to sumo for again making a wonderful game. at the moment we're aware of a few graphics card issues and some issues referring to controller connectivity, but for those of us who have it working and prefer a keyboard set up, here's my little list of suggestions that should make playing the game a bit easier for the harder modes.

Before we start, I’ll let you guys know that I play this game and other races on a laptop, so using the keyboard is normally how i play, as opposed to a game pad.

NOTE: I may have some helpful bits for controller users so don't totally egnore this (I do play with people who prefer controller over keypad who tell me various things on how to handle crafts and race events) and with the character tips section i'll be updating that a little more or maybe doing another guide in regards to in the future as i unlock more of them. For those who have played me occasionally in the multiplayer: yes I am new to all stars racing and no I don't just race to win. I'm one of the few people who doesn't care if I come last in a race over and over again, as I'm willing to admit there's players who are millions times better than me and let's face it,over more than half of you CAN use a contoller for the difficult sections. After all it's just a game and I enjoy being able to play as my fave charcters despite them not always being at the top of the feild or obsenly difficult to handle with the modifications on the crafts on the keyboard. (I have a tendency to favor the vanilla settings in most games as you get used to it long before you unlock any of the extras) When I used to still live at home many years ago, I'd be the only person to clock the games out, but always still the one who was at the back of the pack in a multiplayer race, so it's something i'm used to.

*useful tip if you are playing on a laptop like I am too, make sure you have a laptop rest that has a fan to cool off your computer as you play. this game will over heat it REALLY quickly and the game will eventually crash if your laptop gets too hot. Since i live in a country that has awfully high tempertures during the summer months it's a damn smart investment too.

KeyBoard Setup

First, set your main movement keys up to be used by your left hand, similar to what you already use for a first person perspective game, A= left, D= right, W=forward/up and S=backward/down. Most games use this set up and it's a more natural one for your hands to sit in without strain. Next, set your acceleration button to the space bar, so you can hold it down with your right hand, and make sure the drift button is either V or B or any key really that is right above the spacebar. It’s a lot easier to reach, and can be quickly pressed when you hit corners. your weapon fire button should also be either one of those in the same area of the keyboard, as it's a button that can be handy or you can do what i do and have it equipped to the E key, as i don't tend to use it as often, i prefer to concentrate on not being hit and drifting. you can also place your spin keys (or vehicle flip keys) above the spacebar, however i find that you don't need them unless you’re doing say a world challenge which requires them (i have yet to come across one) or going for the achieve that goes with them - and on that note, if you have problems with handling the plane, putting them close at hand is useful on the other hand as you can doge attacks by rolling out of the way and give you a small boost for a reward, though untill you get used to it I'd put them where the arrow keys are on the right hand side so they are out of the way and not hit accidently throughout the game.

This is my current set up:


As you can see, Keys that I need to use quickly are all together on the keyboard interface and the ones i don't use as often or during a race or event race are places away from my main controls. I use both the left and right flip, they are on either side of my boost key which is above my accelerator space key, which I use to avoid weapon fire in the plane mostly and the two flips i don't use are pushed to one side, as in honesty I haven't come across a situation where I have needed them.

The plane is the most interesting one to control with the keyboard and one i find has the harder cornering when boosting, but by using the boost key you can make tighter turns and even if you don't pull of said boost, the tighter corner hug is a great boon to helping you navigate.

you'll also find that the watercrafts while being tossed around alot are not so difficult to handle after awhile, the keyboard set-up it alot more freindly with this craft, you don't have the disadvantage of being jostled and having to right yourself with joysticks, thought for controler players, i would recommend getting out a copy of waverace blue storm or x-box/ playstation eqivalent if your having some troubles and practice, as that game uses the same mechanics to steer the water crafts around as this one. though one helpful tip i can give both types of players is when you hit a large wave to move in the direction you want your craft to land, or at least set yourself up for landing the right way so you don't have to make that repositioning afterward that can cost you seconds if you have opponents on your tail.

With this basic set up, you should be able to control the game pretty easily, and on the plus side, make the plane much smoother to control as this is one of the harder to steer crafts for keyboard use.

Craft control hints and tips

Aircraft:
Like I have mentioned before in the keyboard set up, the plane isn't the easyiest craft in the game to control for this kind of play, but it can be one of the most fun. When selecting a charcter for this type of craft dominated race, it's much simpler to go with either a character who has overall good handling as it means they will take corners alot tighter and also the balance config modification you can do to the vehicle can help out with character who are not suited for flight.

using the boost/drift is something you need to learn and not shy away from with this craft. the boost/drift tilts the craft on it's side depending on which way you've got your craft going and helps you to make sharper turns. for all crafts, to pull of a sucessful drift boost, you must use the directional key away from the original direction your facing, basically like driving a real car, you steer to the opposite direction out of a skid to avoid sliding the rear of the car around. this keeps you off the walls in any stage and can also benifit those tight squeeze areas you might accidently find yourself in one certain levels when the enviroment changes around you unexpectedly.

another useful thing is to have the right and left spins on hand (there is a reason I set these up on either side of the boost/drift key) is that not only are these great for a tiny boost to get out of a sticky jam, they are that last second enemy weapon dodge that allows you to juke the plane out of the way in the nick of time to avoid being hit and get a boost evade.

Again as the game points out itself durning the loading screens, if you can get into the plane transform quicker on the map the better, as out of all the crafts, it's actully the one that has most of the advantages over the ones on ground level desipte the level of control diffictulty involved. Also, play these levels on an easy difficulty till you learn where most; if not all of the shortcuts are around the tracks as it's mostly always the plane stages in the hard and superstar levels of difficulty where the AI in the game will take advantage of every sneeky loophole of these sections to get one up on you. if you can manage to get a blowfish weapon in this part of the stage I suggest maybe in the tigher shortcuts to leave them smack dab in the middle of them where they are totally unavoidable or lay them in boost rings, it's a mean and dirty trick, but it stops them gaining that advatage as the hit will slow them down.


Motor Vehicle:
The four wheeled vechicles are the most balanced and easy to control out of all the crafts, they're pretty straight forward to drive and steer, and depending on what type of event your doing - either a race or a challange in the world tour mode - the car is typically the most common one you'll use.

now there isn't alot to give pointers with on this type of craft, however in the world event modes being able to teak the characters over all standard stats can become the differnce to being able to do well or do rather poorly in the the car. the World events that use the car are Boost/Dift, Boost and Traffic (if there's more i will add those later) and the charcter you choose for those can affect how the car in general will handle those event tracks (More on that in the character section).

The roads are nice and wide and give plenty of loactions to practice the art of drifting without hitting walls too much or falling off the edges, and a neat little trick to gain a one up is to try and drift along some of the straights as this is where you'll find the car looses some of it's speed if you have a racer that is more geared towards boosting or acceleration, as both of those advantages are more useful when hitting the boosters on the track and coming out of a level 1 or a level 3 stage corner drift. characters who have high speed will loose out on the corners due to poor handling, but that can also unaffect you as a player if you clean the corner with a beautifully excecuted corner drift.

The key to drifting with this craft is this: letting go of the left or right key (depending on which way your drifting) makes you turn inwards towards the inside of the track alot faster than holding down the key that keeps your car away from the wall. so if you have a character with poor handling, this is something useful to know as sharp corners that are harder to navigate can actully be made quite easy buy letting go of the left or the right (again depending on your drift direction) and letting the car spin towards the center.

For charcters that don't have to stress about a loss of speed like those with high acceleration the inwards swing is rather sharp and can crash you very easy, so to avoid this you can tap on and off on the direction your trying to counter drift (remember what I said in the plane section about holding the direction key opposite the direction your traveling to drift) to make sure you keep in the center of the track, as holding it down will make the car crash into the otherside rather quickly too.

In the later harder modes like superstar, characters that are alot slower and have better handling usually come out on top on the car sections due to the level of control they have going around a corner. It's helpful to know this, as one bad crash as Sonic can loose you several positions very fast as it takes a while to get his speed back up afterwards. A fast charcter doesn't mean they're going to win a race, nor does a car with optimal boost or acceleration always gain thier advantages. the trick is the know what your character's strenghs are and to play towards that as you drive around on these stages and bare in mind they do have weaknesses.

Weaponwise, anything that can act as a land mine of sorts that you can laydown or open fire apon your enemy on any of the corners is very hard to avoid, even for the harder AI. a good idea with the car stages is to hold onto your projectile for as long as you can, or until your close enough to another racer so it cannot miss.

Just one thing to mention that may or may not be relevent. The superstar power up is the most overpowered pick up ingame. HOWEVER, you should treat the AI that may or may not have this pickup in it's possesion like a bratty sibling who will use it at the very last second to debunk you from your title. A way that you can avoid this happening is to store your best pickup untill the last lap so that if they do suddenly zip ahead, you can take them out as fast as possible, making them loose enough momentum for you to regain your position. How the system works for the allstar is to get whoever has it as close to the leader as possible in the feild from whatever position they are currently in. It is possible to get it in second place, but the leader has to have already got a significant lead on the rest of the feild before you can obtain it. Its ment to help keep the feild and the competition close so you don't feel like the AI is too slow or you get too cocky and think your better than the programing. You can potentially stop it, but the AI should never be treated any less than said annoying bratting sibling. Remember, watch your back...they're still right behind you... humans don't play fair so why should a computer?

craft control continued

Watercraft:
The water craft is by far one craft I feel is underloved. It bounces around, is slow to corner and is the slowest of all the racers. however, as a keyboard player, it's also highly easy to control as we have a tighter set up from the very begining. If you have ever played Waverace64 or WR BlueStorm, you already have a pretty good idea how these crafts respond to the enviroment while playing with a joysick. it's very easy to make a mistake with this craft and why alot of players who use the controller dislike it.

The areas you use the craft in are rather wide and give you plenty of room to recover if you managed to be bouced around by a wave, and if you have a charcter with good acceleration you'll find they have a fast chance of recovering from a bad water landing.

The major trick with this craft is to angle in the direction you wish to head before you land back on the surface of the water to not loose any time in the race. Turning wide is actully very helpful in this craft as well in regards to drifting, it will level up the charge alot faster this way and give you an allmighty push once you've relased it. Alternatively, you can use the same tecnique as you would on a car drift to keep those corners nice and tight (something us keyboard players have the ablity to do that the controller counter parts can't quite do very well at present but you watch, they'll soon will) to keep your lead advantage as even on the harder difficulties the AI always goes wide.

Take any jump you can to get off the water surface as well, these not only provide shortcuts, but you have enough air time to preform side rolls or back/forward flips before landing back on the water for a double boost effect. Just don't stay in the air too long, as without that boost the craft slows down untill you hit the surface or transform into another vehicle again and you'll loose position if your in a large closely racing group. That said, this is my fave craft out of all of them, as despite not having the same level of skill need to be able to use like the plane, it does take a little bit of quick thinking and jugment making to be able to have a smooth, tightly manovering watercraft that other players will hate to play against in multiplayer matches.

A little character selection tip

Another useful tip for us keyboard players is to pick racers that have good acceleration and overall decent handling. That gives you better control over drifts in tighter corners and if you hit something or clip the track edge walls you can make a quick recovery and not lose too much of your lead if your winning, or help you quickly gain back a position if you lost it falling off the track (it happens alot!) or hit an unroutable when in the plane (like an invisible course edge in the skies of arcadia track). There’s nothing stopping you from picking one with great speed, but so far I haven’t unlocked any that have handling to match the speed well enough that can quickly pick themselves up and regain speed to recapture the distance between racers if you were suddenly knocked back into last place. Don't be afraid to stick with one character and fully upgrade them. you'll find the upgrades will help with the world event levels by a slight tweaking to the standard character settings without having to character hop between them all just to find one that would complete said mission.( Im a diehard jet set radio fan and have a tendency to favour Beat, but I have played with some of the other races and messed with thier handilng as well and found He was a character who had a stable mixture of handling and acceleration which worked rather well for my skill level of keyboard play.)

For Boost races try and use either the boost or speed mod if you have them unlocked, these modifications will help you gain that extra bit of speed from each of the boost markers, and try to drift around the corners as much aspossible inbetween them to stop you from loosing too much time between gates. charcters like Sonic and Ralph who have a good dose of speed and acceleration (Ralph has speed and boost advantage as standard which is also a pro for this type of race) are a win for these, but also characters like Aleix kid who have thier basic standard which has a maxed out acceleration can do just fine here too in the harder races.

For the drift races go for either for a acceleration mod or the Boost mod if you have them unlocked, these will get you between the gates alot faster, the acceleration will make you zipper in sections where's the boost mod can give you a longer extended boost of speed from each drift. Knuckles had some rather good boost stats as a standard racer if you havn't got the mods unlocked for any yet and his overall handling doesn't take much of a hit beacuse of it, though i can't say much for ralph on this one, he's got a good speed and boost, but his handling is poor for some of the wider corners so only if your really confident in your corner turining in the harder modes he'd be great, the football manager also isn't too bad here, you can use his boost advantage and his handling is also pretty good for those odd tight spaces on the water levels.

For stages that involve either flying the aircraft through rings, or the traffic doges, try and either use your basic handling for the character as it's much tighter for some of them by defult (Beat and Amigo are rather good when it comes to cornering in the plane and taking advantage of the boost around corners means a tigher turn around them which is really useful on the skies of Arcadia level and Tails i have found has proven he's rather good to use on the traffic doges levels especally) and also if you have the balanced mod unlocked you'll find this makes things rather tighter in the traffic doges control-wise and a bit more responcive for avoiding those pesky police cars that are thrown in there towards the end of the stage for a clean run.

* I'd just like to point out too, to use AS MANY CHARCTERS AS POSSIBLE if you are intending on multiplayer play. knowing the controls of multiple charcaters is handy especally since you cannot always pick your fave charcters to race with in every match. there's nothing worse than playing someone who only plays one charcter and cannot control another and proceeds to whine about it. it's bad sportsmanship and just overall pathetic gamer qualities that lead to people being nasty to one another. it's just a game, all the charcters are pretty balanced with or without adding the modifications to them and remember it's not the kit, it's how you use it that matters.



Hope this is helpful to those who prefer to use a keyboard, and hopefully you'll be able to master them before you reach the course featured in the last screenshot! it's a REAL hard one!

NOTE: I wasn’t aware of another simple guide like this one until a few hours ago when I decided to swap this from the discussions forum to the game guides section. Please check Rukrio's guide out as he’s done a awesome job and is going to add a controller section in future. the guide can be found here:http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=124538403

I'm also playing this game with some modified settings on my laptop colours, due to some of the events in world mode being hard for me to see do to being slightly colourblind, so if i get anything wrong colour specific-wise i appologise.... and i'm sorry to one guy whom i was racing a few nights ago when i suddenly stopped being a challange for him on the last lap, my other half had to yank my headphones off to ask me a question and i realsied too late you cannot pause a multiplayer match over the internet, so the whole last lap for me had be bring up the rear too far behind to make it worth the poor bloke's while.

[Rerdonso]

[CH | Octo]

I might be late to this game, but can anyone tel me if it's possible to angle my aircraft up and down when playing on a keyboard? Flipping up and down can't take me everywhere and I'm stuck on the Ring Race map on the second stage of the World Tour. :shrug:

[abeaver]

The only problem I have with it is I can't control the aircraft at all.

[abeaver]

My controller won't work anymore on the game so I have to go to keyboard and this guide was very helpful.

[Vallistics]

My controls are a little different, left shift for accelereation and left ctrl for brake, sticky keys are annoying but I prefer it. Find it easier :)

[Wash]

How fire the Hod rod ? On PC ?

[Alice]

My control setup won't save, what do i do?D:

[Meika]

depends. i usually find when i play racers when your really new to the game and learning the controls these things are useful. it's not a recommendation to every skill level of player, i play with others who prefer to hit up speed over everything else first go and are 100% fine driving the crafts around. after working out what racers i liked to race with and modding them right out, I tend to change the craft mod depending on the situation, but when your starting out and have no idea, it's just a usefull idea.

[Heroine Nisa]

Mmmm i can't agree with you in the char selection tip, since theacceleration is nothing to worry about (depends on the map too) my main character is Vyse usaully so. Anyway, ty for the tips.

[Zagnaphein]

You are my god! i was trying to find someone explaining the keyboard set up