All sequels have to live up to their predecessors in some form, but few have as daunting a task as Mario Kart World. It’s a follow-up to the best-selling game across Nintendo’s last two console generations, and a game that eventually doubled in size thanks to an ambitious array of downloadable add-ons. So instead of following Mario Kart 8 with another release that simply adds more, Nintendo shifted in a slightly different direction. Mario Kart World is still Mario Kart; it has a daunting Rainbow Road to speed across and frustrating blue shells to steal victories away from you. But it also introduces an open-world structure that makes the game feel larger and more cohesive. This makes it the ideal game to show off what the Switch 2 is capable of at launch.
The biggest change for World is its structure. In all past Mario Kart games, racetracks were discrete entities. Baby Park and Bowser’s Castle had nothing to do with each other. But for World, the entirety of the game takes place on a singular landmass with different areas and biomes, like the map in Fortnite. And because of this, everything is connected. When you race through Grand Prix mode, you go through four tracks that cut a specific path through the continent, one following the other.
At first, this gave me a sense that the tracks were less distinct and singular, because they bled into one another. At the start of the Choco Mountain track, for instance, you start out in the quaint green fields of Moo Moo Meadows, because that course comes before it. And it isn’t until the second lap that you actually get to the mountains. But eventually I came to enjoy the fluidity of the track design, and how it gave the feeling of a larger overall world.
I’m not sure if this structure is necessarily better than the more straightforward racetracks of past games, and it’s certainly a change that takes some getting used to. But it ended up winning me over, in part because of how different it feels, and how much I’m enjoying playing the same tracks repeatedly to find all of the details and paths.
The structure also gives rise to my favorite addition to World: a new mode called Knockout Tour. It’s sort of like a battle royale version of Mario Kart. Instead of a handful of distinct races, you’re ushered through a series of six connected tracks without stopping. At certain points throughout the race, a gate appears, and any racer behind the position noted on the gate will be knocked out. This progresses until only one kart rider remains. I’ve been playing Mario Kart for decades, but Knockout Tour still managed to create a new kind of thrill in me, one strengthened by its longer runtime and harsh win conditions. It also makes for a great spectator experience. It’s a lot of fun watching people just make it over the line.
There are other new features in the game. That includes new weapons like an ice flower for tossing snowballs at other racers, or a mushroom that turns you into a giant that can squash your enemies. You can pick up food at drive-through restaurants for a speed boost (and costume change), and grind on rails and ride on walls, though I’ve yet to master either of those high-level techniques just yet. And the cast of racers is gigantic this time, expanded even further by all of the different outfits you can unlock for characters like Peach and Waluigi.
These elements go a long way to making World feel like a proper sequel. But again, it’s the world at the heart of World that makes it feel truly new — and like a showcase for Nintendo’s latest hardware. World’s courses are larger and more intricate, with lots of alternate pathways, but they’re also a lot more chaotic. The game features 24 people per race, instead of the previous 12, and there always seems to be something or someone blowing up on screen. You can drive on water now, and that often means racing across massive cresting waves, and many of the stages are teeming with wildlife, from lumbering dinosaurs to herds of zebras. The levels aren’t just big, they’re alive, dense with things to see and interact with (and avoid being hit by).
And yet, in my experience, the game always ran smooth and solid. This was true when playing online (both in handheld and docked modes), as well as in four-player split-screen, in which there is frankly too much information happening onscreen at once. It is the definition of chaos. But it also worked perfectly.
Image: Nintendo
Of course, World isn’t an open world in the same way that Red Dead Redemption II or Cyberpunk 2077 are. It’s not a dynamic space filled with things to do and people to see. But it’s surprisingly close for a family-friendly racing game where you can ride a motorcycle as a dolphin. The weather and time of day shift, and there’s a new Free Roam mode where you can simply drive around the map, exploring with zero pressure. There isn’t a whole lot to do aside from some straightforward challenge missions scattered about, but I’ve spent a long time simply observing Nintendo’s strange creation. At one point, I realized that the city buses actually stopped to let Shy Guys and Toads on and off. It’s a completely unnecessary detail, but one that goes to show how thought-out this place is.
There are a handful of minor issues with the game — unlocking characters relies too much on luck, and it’s a weird miss to not have the Free Roam mode support split-screen play — but the scale, density, and cohesiveness of World are more than enough to make them easy to look past. Mario Kart 8 was such a high bar that Nintendo couldn’t simply do that again. Instead, the game’s designers created something much more interesting: a place that feels vibrant and alive. Now you just have to race through it.
Mario Kart World is available now on the Nintendo Switch 2.
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