“Mario Kart World is a knockout, even if it tries a little too hard to present itself as one.”
- Airtight racing
- Knockout Tour is excellent
- Tons of unlockables
- Fantastic soundtrack
- Driving between tracks can be dull
- Free-roam is a little bland
How do you keep players coming back to a game for 10 years? Many studios have fallen into last place in pursuit of that answer, but Nintendo is determined to find it and claim the ultimate prize with Mario Kart World.
The first big exclusive for the Nintendo Switch 2 feels like it was engineered to draft off of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe‘s decade of success, riding its wind tunnel to first place. Everything about is built to keep that momentum rolling as long as possible, from its excellent new elimination mode to its open-world collect-a-thon pivot. It’s an armored vehicle, reinforced with layers of steel meant to protect its engine from the inevitable red shells of long-term service gaming until the Switch 2’s gas runs out.
Will that be enough for it to snatch a gold cup after a 10 year gauntlet? It very well may. Mario Kart World delivers fine-tuned racing, strong multiplayer potential, and a bevy of unlockables that keep every session rewarding. But its tacked on exploration component, one that tries too hard to force long-term success, is a reminder that even a driver with a tremendous lead on the competition still isn’t safe from a dreaded blue shell.
Reliable racing
While Mario Kart World adds some major new components to the series, Nintendo stays very close to its predecessor’s formula here. And who can blame it? I’d trail Mario Kart 8 Deluxe‘s ghost data too if I was trying to set another record. World is still a three-button racing game that balances casual fun and high-level skill. It’s all about zooming through themed tracks, mastering the art of the drift, and dealing with the chaos that comes from lap-changing items.
This is kart racing locked down to a colorful science.
The secret to the Mario Kart series’ success is that winning isn’t just about outracing opponents. It’s just as much a game about crisis management. The winners are the ones who know how to keep their cool when getting hit when a shell and zapped with lightning in rapid succession. They know that there’s always a way to come back if they play it cool. It’s only the weak-willed who curse the blue shell, swearing to an unjust God. World shifts that idea into its next gear, giving players more tools that can help them regain momentum and get back in the pack.
Chief among its new tricks is the addition of grinding and wall riding. Karts can now snap to level decorations like road dividers, suspension bridge cables, and more, giving them more potential boost points to work with during a race. Wall riding serves a similar purpose, as players can glide along walls to find more inventive paths through levels. World’s new tracks are filled with possibilities for players as a result, putting more of an emphasis on daring experimentation to mount comebacks rather than following the rules of the road.
That change comes with a new technique: a charged jump. By holding down the drift button without touching the control stick, players can charge a jump and release it to hop in the air. Doing so will allow them to ride a wall, reach grind rails that wouldn’t otherwise be reachable, or even dodge incoming items with the right timing. It’s a great idea that will benefit high-skill players looking to get even more competitive, but its implementation is a bit alienating for casual players. I often find myself accidentally entering a drift when I mean to jump since both are mapped to the same trigger. With so many unused buttons on even a single Joy-con, it’s a little strange to see two fundamental controls doubled up.
That complaint gets relegated to nitpick status the more I race, which reinforces the series’ strength. Even without engaging with that skill, World is instantly enjoyable any time I pick up my Switch 2. I still get a rush every time I nail someone with a fireball or turn so wide that I initiate a third phase drift. Even the tiniest moments feel like victories that players of all ages can hit. Features like smart steering and a new rewind button even give casual players more flexibility to land more of those moments. This is kart racing locked down to a colorful science.
A knockout mode
Just about any staple mode from the series’ past returns for the supersized sequel. Grand Prix mode remains the core of the experience, as its four-race gauntlets are the perfect length for multiplayer sessions. Versus modes like Balloon Battle add a little more diversity for those who want more close quarters competition, even though they are limited with only eight arenas at launch. The most skilled players out there can still aim for records in Time Trials and upload their results to the internet. That alone is already a total package for the genre.
The clear star of the show, though, is the brand new Knockout Tour mode. Bringing the undeniable draw of battle royale games to Mario Kart, the new addition is a 24-player race that takes players through six maps in one uninterrupted gauntlet. The slowest players are eliminated at the end of each track with the final lap coming down to four players. It’s a remarkably tense addition that makes every little moment that much more important. There’s a new rush that comes from getting knocked into last place by a bullet bill and suddenly having to pull out a comeback in less than a minute in order to continue on. While Grand Prix has always been Mario Kart’s signature mode, this feels like it could actually take the crown.
Mario Kart World‘s version of Rainbow Road is an all-timer …
It’s thanks to that mode and the underlying open-world map that makes it possible, though, that I find one fault in World‘s design. The package includes 32 new tracks, which are a little uneven. It’s not that some are great and others aren’t; that division often happens within the same map. Because every track exists on an interconnected world that links them all together, they often have a bit of an environmental transition baked into them. That means that I sometimes need to spend a lap driving down a dull straight highway to get to the tightly themed level I actually want to see.
Take DK Spaceport as an example. The new level is a highlight in the package, as it sends players up a winding structure circling a docked spaceship. That path is full of obstacles that call back to the original Donkey Kong, including a mechanical ape that tosses barrels during one of its straightaways. In Grand Prix mode, that’s preceded by a two lap gauntlet through some nondescript highways that transition players from the canyon-themed level preceding it to a more standard highway that leads to the track. That burdens most tracks with extra fluff that make some seem more unmemorable than they really are (note that Time Trials cut those interstitial bits out entirely, suggesting that even Nintendo considers them to be expendable add-ons).
It’s a bit of a shame considering that there are a lot of stellar tracks here after lap one. Boo Cinema takes players through a haunted movie theater rather than a typical Mario ghost house. Dino Dino Jungle is teeming with massive dinosaurs, with long necks and spines that I can grind on. World‘s version of Rainbow Road is an all-timer too, using the Switch 2’s increased power to turn a classic course into an intergalactic spectacle filled with shooting stars and sparkling crystals. Each one is intricately designed and painted in bright color palettes that set each apart from one another. It just takes time to get there.
That design decision makes a lot more sense when you accept that Mario Kart World was tuned around Knockout Tour. The extra mileage feels much more natural when racing across a map with no loading between races. In those tournaments, I’m more easily able to appreciate how logical the construction of it all feels. If I’m moving from a snowy track to a grassy field, I can actually see the snow start to thin out on the side of the road as grass takes over. That attention to detail makes places tracks like Moo Moo Meadows into context, letting players see the off ramps they need to take to find it tucked away next to a river. Moments like that make me feel like Mario’s races actually exist in real spaces for the first time ever.
Free roaming, forever
Nintendo takes that idea one step too far with the package’s most ambitious swing: free-roam. At any point while on the main menu, I can press the plus button to drop into the full open-world. I am given unrestricted access to not just the tracks, but the spaces between them that we only imagine exist in Mario Kart games. It’s a great magic trick the first time I experience it, and one that lets me really appreciate how much detail Nintendo puts into spaces that I barely even get a chance to look at during races. That’s best seen in Crown City, an urban race track in Grand Prix that reveals itself as a densely detailed city in free roam. You could spend hours driving around its winding streets, appreciating stray ads for Birdo fashion brands or Koop Troops gathering in a park around food carts.
It’s an impressive visual tech demo for the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware as well. It’s incredible that I can drive from one end of the map to the other in 10 minutes without hitting a single load, all while driving through fully functional race tracks. I can see some of the seams when I launch high into the air and notice some light asset pop-in below me, but that doesn’t take away from just how much I can see when I look out at a world of vivid colors, shuffling critters, and karts cruising down the highways.
The free-roam experience beyond pure artistic admiration is sparse. There are three primary collectibles sprinkled through the world in large quantities. Each track has a set of question mark panels to ride over, there are hard to reach Peach coins hiding in the world, and there are hundreds of racing challenges to complete found in P-Switches. The latter is the bulk of what players do when playing solo, taking on bite-sized challenges that usually amount to reaching some sort of finish line or collecting eight blue coins. While they’re perfectly fine treasure hunting distractions, the reward for nabbing these collectibles is underwhelming. Each one grants a tiny sticker, one of which can be assigned to the player’s profile at a time. It’s a lot of effort and time spent for a collectible that I barely ever see. Free-roam is basically The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild if you took everything out of its world save for the Korok challenges.
Nintendo wants you to feel like this is a game you could play for 10 years, and it’s a little overeager to get there.
It’s a strange decision considering that World is filled with more substantial unlockables elsewhere. Completing Grand Prix cups nets me new characters and there are tons of karts that are earned over time by collecting enough coins across all modes. There are also an exorbitant amount of character skins to unlock (like my bless little Koopa in his little sailor outfit), but those are only earned by grabbing food bags from the world. There were plenty of ways to make the core world collectibles more satisfying to chase, but all of the best rewards only intersect with free roam’s core draw. It’s especially a shame that World did away with Mario Kart 8‘s kart customization feature, as hidden parts would have made for great collectibles.
I’ve spent a lot of time playing free-roam mode, trying to figure out what exactly its function is. The oddest part about it is that it isn’t presented as a core mode next to the likes of Grand Prix when looking at the list of single-player options. The prompt to enter it is tucked into the bottom corner of the screen, almost as if to signal that it’s more like entering an art gallery in an Extras menu. It’s not treated like a selling point, but it’s clearly meant to be one. After all, it’s a big part of World‘s $80 sales pitch. A big world justifies a bigger price tag, right?
It all starts to make more sense to me when I think back to Mario Kart 8‘s long-tailed success, something World is desperate to emulate without leaving it to chance. Free-roam, like a lot of features, is constructed so that it creates the illusion that there is infinite content to discover here. For instance, note that the open-world map never marks the location of any collectible and doesn’t even hint at how many there are. As far as players know, they’re endless. If you did happen to find all 300+ of them, you might still be convinced that there are some still out there that you’ve missed. The same goes for World‘s enormous character roster, which doles out a seemingly never ending drip feed of B-list Mario characters and alternate costumes for the core crew (the fact that most of the more fun racers don’t get extra skins is a shame, as I feel disincentivized from using them in races as food bags won’t give them anything).
Nintendo wants you to feel like this is a game you could play for 10 years, and it’s a little overeager to get there. I still remember playing Mario Kart 8 for dozens and dozens of hours on Wii U without the need for all of these extras. The racing was exhilarating enough that I turned to modes like Time Trials, beating the ghost data on every single level. If you give players a truly great game that’s fun to play, they’ll always find more ways to get time out of it. Think of how long Super Smash Bros. Melee remained a multiplayer staple with a fraction of Ultimate‘s characters, stages, or modes. There’s a bit of unnecessary insecurity baked into free-roam that speaks to a broader flaw in today’s quest for the big hit game that will keep players playing and paying for as long as possible: There’s too much emphasis on the filler, not the killer.
That’s the critical way to interpret free-roam, but the more I play, the more I find myself leaning towards a more charitable perspective. The casual exploration makes for a great chillout experience that’s best enjoyed in small, curious chunks between races. I don’t think Nintendo intends for players to treat it like a Ubisoft open-world game — a checklist to be completed. It’s more just a place to joyride for a bit, listening to World‘s fantastic soundtrack of Mario remixes that adapts generations of great game music into smooth jazz. P-Switches aren’t laid out in a way so that my eye is obsessively led to the next one. I ride around for a few minutes, listen to the Delfino Plaza theme, get a few new stickers, and head back to the race track.
That’s how I really see Mario Kart World fitting into my life eight or nine years from now. It won’t be a game that consumes all my time and attention. It will be like loading up a round of Solitaire on my phone; a reliable comfort. That’s the undeniable appeal of Mario Kart. It doesn’t matter if I log in every week to find a new P-Switch or twice a year to check out its latest round of DLC tracks. So long as the engine starts every time I turn the keys, I’ll keep taking my kart out of the garage for a quick joyride.
Mario Kart World was tested on Nintendo Switch 2.
