Mario Kart World Review
I Can Show You the Mario Kart World
I have been playing Mario Kart 8 in some form for over ten years. That’s not a joke. I first got it in the summer of 2014 on Wii U, and since then it has endured two entire console generations as the “newest” mainline Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart 8 is really solid, but it was definitely time for something new even in a fairly iterative franchise like Mario Kart. All Nintendo really needed to do was put out a new game with a couple new features here and there to sell units like crazy, but instead they wanted to make those eleven years of waiting count for something more. In a franchise very capable of resting on its laurels, Mario Kart World takes big swings with its tracks, gameplay, and the brand-new open world structure. In a bid to get people on board with Switch 2 early, their first exclusive couldn’t just be more of the same, but how smooth of a ride is this new Mario Kart?
As far as the driving itself is concerned, Mario Kart World is absolutely leading the pack. For the life of the series, Mario Kart has fundamentally been about hitting smooth drifts for mini-turbos and occasionally catching a cool off-road shortcut with a mushroom. Though newer installments would improve the feel, this core experience remained the same. Mario Kart World has great drifting, to be sure, but there’s a lot more to racing this time around. By holding the drift button while going straight instead of turning, drivers can now charge up a little jump. With this or the air you catch from a ramp, you can land on grinding rails or even walls to cut whole new lines through the track. Not only does the boost you can build from a jump give you something more interesting to do on straightaways, but these new ways of interacting with the track make racing a much more engaging, freestyle thing.
These new driving mechanics definitely take some time to master. I love anything that rewards skill and practice more in a game, and I was pleasantly surprised to see mechanics like this in a game so popular with casual players. In that classic Nintendo fashion, though, it’s easy to understand but hard to master. Many rails aren’t necessarily faster than the main track, and since you can ride on any wall, you’ve got to have a good sense for which ones will actually save you time. Since the jump takes a good bit to charge, reaching the wall for a shortcut can take some planning ahead too. Regardless, just about anyone can find themselves making some use of these features, and it’s not like the most optimal route on a track is the only fun one.
Of course, it’s the course design that really lets these features shine. More than just course design, though, this game’s real highlight is world design; the courses are now organized as key locations on a sprawling, interconnected world. If you’re looking to experience everything in this world, Free Roam is the place to go. The world may be huge, but it never feels empty, with tons of challenges to take on and secrets to find. Secret panels and Peach Medallions occupy some hard-to-reach spots, pushing you to make the most of your new movement abilities. Challenges can turn just about every inch of the overworld into an interesting drive, setting up rings, coins, and/or obstacles to make for a fun route. One challenge would often spit me out right next to another one, and before I knew it, an hour had passed. With an utterly massive shuffle of arrangements of classic Mario songs playing constantly as you roam, it makes for a pretty relaxing time. It’s a good thing I’m not a completionist, though, because the game hardly tracks your progress with these things. Aside from tallying up what you’ve already done, the map doesn’t mark anything outside of the courses and how many secrets of theirs you’ve found. Taking what comes as you find it is fun, but getting that last lousy point is going to be a real pain.
The most interesting thing about this world, though, is how the game mediates your experience with this huge continent. Every mode plays with the tracks and their connection to the rest of the world in a different way. This game’s version of the classic four-race Grand Prix mode, aside from hosting 24 racers instead of 12, now features the drive from one course to the next as part of the races. If you want to experience every course’s standard laps, Time Trials or VS mode can give you that. VS mode even lets you select every possible drive from one course to a neighboring course, making the amount of discrete “drives” in this game pretty massive. The cutthroat new Knockout Tour mode is a nonstop drive through the world where everyone below a certain placement gets eliminated at various checkpoints, and the first one to reach the end wins the whole thing. Though I haven’t had an opportunity to play with anyone else, Knockout Tour seems like a lot of fun for couch multiplayer. Battle Mode makes use of many wider areas which you can explore in Free Roam. Modes like these ensure that every connecting highway or open lot has interesting use in competition; a route that may have led to a secret in Free Roam can be a huge shortcut in Knockout Tour, for instance.
Thanks to a healthy dose of cartoonish Mario charm, no part of the open world gets too boring. An ordinary highway can be punctuated by a goofy vehicle popping out random items or a bomb set to explode just cruising along like a normal car. Every course has a lot of nice details to make them feel like lived-in places; the announcer at Wario Stadium hypes up the crowd, and course details that used to live in the background like the top of Airship Fortress’ tower can now be explored. In spite of the Mario goofiness and the general racetrack logic of the whole world, it feels pretty natural. You can use a comprehensive Photo Mode with lots of filters and frames to pose in your favorite spots in the middle of any mode.
I even spotted a bald eagle in the middle of a Knockout Tour!
Every area is punctuated by its regional food, which not only provides a boost like the Mushroom but can transform most characters with special outfits depending on the food item. Unfortunately, the outfits aren’t exactly divvied up evenly - poor Donkey Kong and Pauline only get one - but the outfits that are here are all pretty good. This game also has a whole slew of random minor Mario characters playable, such as the much-publicized cow or most recurring Mario enemies that you can think of. Since every character outfit occupies its own slot on the character select screen for some reason, it ends up getting pretty cluttered, but more choices are still good.
As you might expect, a few things from previous entries didn’t make the cut. The last two Mario Kart games put a lot of emphasis on kart customization, but it’s completely gone here. This game has a very fun variety of karts and bikes, such as the excellent R.O.B Hog which makes it look like the lovable Robotic Operating Buddy is holding the front wheel, but no more mixing and matching. This gives more serious players less control over their stats, but it’s a small loss if you ask me. In previous games, certain motorcycles had a different drifting style dubbed “inside drift.” I preferred inside drift for my decade of Mario Kart 8, but it sadly hasn’t returned. Oh well.
Gliding has also been reworked with plane-wings jutting out of the kart instead of a hanglider. Doing barrel rolls with sideways stunts is fun, but I find the new gliding controls a little imprecise. Same goes for the new surface-skimming which replaces underwater driving. Driving on the water’s surface is slower, and drifting just feels terrible on anything but the calmest seas. Do your best to avoid water when you can; there’s often fun ways to wall-ride around it. Lastly, for as much as the courses and their interconnected nature brings to the table, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe simply has more courses, and that might be preferred for folks who don’t find any of the new features appealing.
On the whole, though, I’m really impressed with Mario Kart World. Even if we hadn’t been waiting over a decade, this one would’ve felt just as fresh and exciting for the series. Nintendo has proven their pedigree for game design fundamentals once again, masterfully expanding on Mario Kart’s classic formula to make a deeper, more varied game that still doesn’t leave casual players in the dust. That said, it doesn’t come cheap as a Switch 2 exclusive. For die-hard Mario Kart fans and those who enjoy the single-player content, this is a worthy investment. I recommend this game to anyone, but if you’re content with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or just not as invested, you can probably afford to wait. It’ll still be here when you’re ready.