Mario Kart World’s true predecessor, Mario Kart 8, is a difficult game to improve on. It received universal acclaim from critics and fans and spanned two console generations, sustaining series fans for over a decade. But all great reigns must come to an end. Here to take its place is Mario Kart World, which stands on the shoulders of the giant that came before and, seeing the vast world around it, sends players out to explore. The next step for Mario Kart is to go bigger in almost every way – more options for character customisations, more race modes, and now with weird, slightly eyebrow-raising stickers to slap on your vehicle as you drive it through the gates and into the open world.
If you read Paul’s preview of the game just before its’ launch, you’ll already know a lot of what there is to know about Mario Kart World. As is often the way with these touchstone series, if you’ve ever played a Mario Kart game before, you’ll also know a lot of what there is to know here. The classic modes have all returned – Grand Prix, a four race championship for you to master alone or use to ruin friendships; VS Mode, for when you want to do single races, or race using a set of custom rules to ruin your friendships even faster; Time Trial, which you can use to prove how fast you are once your friendships are all gone and you’ve got a lot of time to kill, and Battle Mode, once things turn nasty.
In almost all of these modes, the objective is to collect items that help you to go fast or to overtake at all costs to be the first to cross the finish line. Battle Mode gives you two options – Balloon Battle, in which you can collect items to ruthlessly attack those on the opposing team, trying to stop your own balloons from being popped, and Coin Runners – the nicer, more peaceful mode, in which your main goal is to collect more coins than anyone else. If you’re so inclined, you can try to mind your own business and do this in a non-threatening, live-and-let-live, respectful way. Chances are, that won’t be the case, and you’ll once again be using items to attack your competitors to force them to lose coins, which you can then collect. But hey – at least in Battle Mode, as violent as it is, you and your friends can choose whether or not you’re on the same team. So while it offers an avenue for starting fights, it also offers one for uniting you in victory against a shared enemy. Your call.
So let’s look at what’s new.
First, Knockout Tour, where you’ll spend every moment fighting for your life in a battle royale-style line-up that culls the herd with every lap. Not in the top 20 after the first lap? You’re gone. Then you’re down to 16, 12, 8… you get it. As all Mario Kart aficionados know, all is not always fair on a Mushroom Kingdom speedway. No matter how solid your lead may be, if someone hits you with a red shell as you’re nearing that checkpoint, it can be enough to ruin your race entirely. Having 24 riders on a course means that the chaos levels of Mario Kart World have been upped a thousand percent, and more than ever it’s possible to go from second to twenty-second in the blink of an eye, having found yourself swallowed up by the herd. In a grand prix race, you might have time to get yourself back out of the pack and re-establish a lead before the finish line, but in Knockout Tour, there’s no time for that. You have to be ready for anything, and sometimes, there’s really just no way of fighting back.
Knockout Tour adds an interesting dynamic to playing with your friends, especially in local/couch co-op mode. It definitely fosters a sense of camaraderie, as you wish for your friends to remain in the race so that the competition can continue (and because they’re more fun to race against than bots), but it also means that if someone gets knocked out in round one, they’ll have to spend a long time sitting around without much to do. Knockout Tour races – as is true for many of the new courses in Mario Kart World – can get quite lengthy, and sitting around waiting for them to end can be a bit of a pain.
But while Knockout Tour is chaotic and stressful, Mario Kart World’s other biggest addition is almost the exact opposite. Free Roam, in which you’re given the freedom to plonk yourself down in any part of the game’s expansive world and just cruise around for a bit, is the epitome of peace. You can get to know the terrains, perfect your drifts, and try to practice some of the mechanics that the game makes absolutely no effort to teach you. Like did you know you can gain charge while going in a straight line now? I didn’t, for more than a week of playing this game, until somebody else let me in on the secret. But Mario Kart has always been like that – easy to learn, hard to master. At least in the open world, you can just kind of mess around to figure these things out without the pressure of the horrible shame of losing a race because of it.
Throughout the open world, there are blue P-Switches, similar to those seen in mainline Mario games which reveal hidden challenges or areas. Here, they are no different. By driving over a P-Switch, you can unlock challenges that ask you to navigate the world in new ways (the closest the game gets to showing you new mechanics), or using specific boosts, and in doing so will unlock stickers that you can attach to your vehicles. There are some truly strange ones in there, like the mini replica of a heart-shaped sign that just says ‘Milky’ (presumably a nod to the Moo Moo Meadows cows), along with more normal ones, but really – who wants to be normal?
While driving around, you’ll also come across little golden bags that you can collect as long as you have a free power-up slot ready to go. These bags, along with giving you a speed boost, will randomly change the costume of your character, with the chance of unlocking new ones that can then be chosen from the character selection screen. It’s an interesting way to unlock new character skins, and forces you to play as each character in order to unlock their variations. Some of the variations make sense – like a Pro Racer outfit or leather biker gear – but for some of them, I have questions. Like, why are more than one of the Yoshis fast food workers, and none of the other characters? It raises a lot of interesting questions about the lore surrounding a Yoshi’s role in the Mushroom Kingdom. But anyway, I digress – the outfits are cool.
Free Roam particularly shines when paired with the Switch 2’s new GameChat function, allowing you to jump into a voice call Discord-style and just chat while you explore the open world. There’s a quiet charm to discovering a new outfit while in the company of friends, and then doing donuts around them to show it off, or to randomly zooming off into different directions and losing track of where you are, too engrossed in conversation to care where you’re going. It’s just… nice. It’s hard not to think about how much nicer it would have been to be able to do this during the pandemic, which is presumably when the idea was conceived, but it’s still nice now.
I didn’t necessarily believe it at first, but after spending some time with it, I feel like maybe Mario Kart World was the perfect launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2. It reminds us of the pure joy that can come from just sitting around, talking smack, and playing video games with your friends, whether together or apart. It’s familiar, and bright, and welcoming, and gives you everything you remember loving about Mario Kart – but with a few new things that give you a reason to take your time to explore it. Some things feel a little different too – you won’t be able to rely on drifting so much to dominate a race, and you can be swarmed by an impossible amount of competitors at any moment, but that’s just something new to get used to. I’m certainly ready to put in the time it takes to get comfortable with Mario Kart World, and so far, I’d be pretty happy to sit with it for another decade.
Player 2 reviewed Mario Kart World on Nintendo Switch 2 using a code kindly provided by Nintendo Australia.
