A Belated Mario Kart World Review

As a franchise, Mario Kart occupies kind of a strange place for Nintendo. It’s a crowd-pleaser, a party game that is a mainstay for people of all ages, yet it hasn’t really changed much since the original game launched on the SNES. Sure each version would bring a twist to the existing gameplay mechanics like gliding, anti-gravity, or using two characters on one vehicle, but aside from incremental physics engine upgrades (drift, weight/top speed trade-offs), the series has been largely stagnant.

With Mario Kart World acting as the flagship launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2, it makes sense that the game would have to do something new and inventive to try and drive sales. The new thing they introduce is a vast open world, not dissimilar from various Need For Speed games in the past, that you get the chance to explore in your kart. On top of this, aside from the usual Grand Prix mode, there is also a new racing mode called Knockout Battle which operates as a sprint where the lowest performing races are incrementally eliminated as the race goes on.

All of these things sound good on paper, but some of the execution is a little flawed. For example, when you race in a Grand Prix cup, after the first race where you do three laps around a circuit, each subsequent race consists of driving to the next course and then doing one lap around the circuit. In this scenario, what you end up with is a series of races that lack the chaotic energy that you’d expect from this series. This is especially apparent during the portions of the race to get from track A to track B, which are largely straightaways with minimal opportunities to drift.

The other aspect of the game that falls a little flat is the open world exploration. While the world is massive and the areas are both unique and blend together well, there is a ton of area where there’s just nothing. On top of this, a good amount of the areas to drive and explore are on terrain that’s not meant to be drivable, which makes the process of exploring them drag a little bit.

Aside from the collection of tokens, switches, and question mark panels, the other thing that needs to be collected are the alternate costumes for the existing main roster of characters and the collection of the side characters. I’m not knocking the fact that the majority of the roster is just reskins of the main cast, and I’m definitely not knocking the fact that most of these can end up being unlocked during regular gameplay, but I will disparage the methodology to unlock the side characters like Pianta, Cow, and others. Most of these are bound to random chance via Kamek’s spell during a race, which is just kind of a little grindey.

Mario Kart World is not the launch title that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was, but it also does not necessarily need to. Whether or not Mario Kart as a franchise needed to evolve remains to be seen, but the general feeling I got from this game was not dissimilar to the feeling I got playing Princess Peach Showtime. This is a good start, an interesting approach to something truly great that could come down the line, but right now this is just fine. As a $70 title, it feels lacking, but as a bundle in with a new console it’s definitely a great way to show off the increased power of the Switch 2.

★★★★