Samsung TV / game / CANDY KART
REVIEW
Candy Kart is a small kids' kart-racer with small ambitions.
Desoline's Tizen-only kart game is a short, brightly coloured racing app aimed at younger players on the family TV. It does the job for ten minutes.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 9, 2026 · 2 MIN READ
The Samsung TV gaming category is a niche inside a niche. Tizen’s app store hosts a steady trickle of small games from small studios — products built to a very low price ceiling for an audience that mostly doesn’t think of their TV as a gaming surface. Candy Kart from Desoline is one of those products, a candy-themed kart racer aimed squarely at young children watching the family TV with the remote as the only available controller.
Within that brief, the game is honest about what it is. It runs, it’s free, it has no advertising, and the visual style is calibrated for a young audience that responds to bright colours and cheerful music. For a five-year-old who wants ten minutes of TV-game distraction, Candy Kart functions adequately and doesn’t try to extract money or attention beyond the install.
The reasons to pass are the same reasons most Tizen games struggle. The remote isn’t a real controller, the content depth doesn’t sustain repeated play, and the production values can’t compete with anything from a properly-resourced studio. Desoline is doing what’s possible at this budget tier; the result is a game that exists, serves a narrow purpose, and won’t be remembered. Score it for what it is, not for what it isn’t trying to be.
Candy Kart is the kart-game equivalent of a single supermarket cupcake — sugary, brief, and forgotten before the screensaver kicks in.
FEATURES
Candy Kart on Tizen is a kart-racing game from Desoline, a small studio shipping multiple lightweight titles to the Samsung TV store. It's free, runs on the Tizen remote, and targets the young-children couch-gaming slot — the same niche Samsung's first-party Gaming Hub aims at without committing serious resources.
Core loop: pick a candy-themed kart, pick a candy-themed track, race three AI opponents, finish first to unlock the next track. The control surface is the standard Tizen direction-pad mapping (left/right to steer, OK to accelerate, Back to brake or pause). Track count and kart count are limited — under ten of each at last check.
No multiplayer, no cross-device save, no online leaderboards. The game runs offline once installed. The candy aesthetic is the entire art direction.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
For a parent who needs five minutes of distraction and a TV that supports the Tizen remote as a controller, Candy Kart functions. The brightness, the visual feedback on a successful overtake, the cheerful music loop — these are calibrated for a young audience and they hit that target. Loading times are short and the install is small.
The age-appropriate framing is honest. There are no in-app purchases, no advertising, no microtransaction prompts. For the under-eight audience this app is built for, the experience is cleaner than the equivalent free racing app on a phone.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The content is thin. A handful of tracks, a handful of karts, AI opponents that follow a simple rubber-band difficulty curve — a child will exhaust the meaningful gameplay variety inside an afternoon. There's no progression system worth speaking of and no reason to come back after the unlock arc finishes.
Tizen-remote-as-controller is a fundamentally compromised input. Steering with a direction pad designed for menu navigation produces twitchy, unsatisfying handling that no amount of art polish hides. A proper Bluetooth gamepad would help; Candy Kart doesn't materially improve when one is connected, because the game design wasn't built around the better input.
Production values are budget-tier. The kart models, the track environments, the UI typography — everything reads as a stock-asset assemblage rather than designed art. That's defensible at the price (free), but it's also the reason the game won't outlast the install.
CONCLUSION
Install Candy Kart only if a young household member needs a brightly coloured, ad-free TV game for a short stint. Don't expect it to compete with Mario Kart, the various Sonic racers, or any properly-budgeted family kart game on a console. Desoline is shipping this product into a slot Samsung's TV ecosystem doesn't otherwise serve, which gives Candy Kart a reason to exist; that reason is narrow and the ceiling is low.