It’s not often that I am (relatively) on top of the zeitgeist in video games, playing the new big-name release of the moment while also having a lot of detailed thoughts about it, so I figured I’d take advantage of it and get out my thoughts on ‘Mario Kart World’, since they’re weirdly complicated.
Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: following up ‘Mario Kart 8’ was always going to be a tall order. It feels easy to forget that, given how much the game has become a fixture of the gaming landscape, serving as the most recent mainline entry in the series for over a decade. It’s maybe also easy to lose sight of just how defining a landmark it was that landscape, too; the Mario Kart series has long been one of Nintendo’s blockbusters, but MK8 took it to absurd levels.*
*It’s not essential to this column, but I love number-based trivia too much to pass some of this up, even if the data is a little less comprehensive than sports stats. MK8 was the best-selling game on two straight Nintendo consoles. On Wii U, it sold nearly 8.5 million copies, which still put it 2.5 million ahead of second place on the console. On Switch, it octupled those numbers, crossing the 68 million mark and landing over 20 million ahead of the second-best seller, the most recent Animal Crossing. It more than doubled the sales of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ and ‘Super Mario Odyssey’, the big new entries for Nintendo’s two flagship series. It sold roughly as many copies as every single new mainline Pokémon entry on the console combined (Sword, Shield, Scarlet, Violet, and Legends Arceus). It still regularly pops up on Nintendo’s monthly best-seller lists, despite being a decade old. And combining the two versions’ sales, it appears to be the fifth-best selling video game of all-time. There’s even a chance those numbers will go up for a little bit longer, since the most recent update seems to have been from the end of March.
Even setting aside the crazy objective stats for the more subjective evaluations, as a long-time fan of the series, I think it’s pretty easy to call 8 Deluxe “The Definitive Mario Kart Game”. Even when the original game was released, I was already inclined to that idea; the 32 base-game courses include many of the best tracks in series history, and I think the overall set is easily the best one all-around. The retro levels all feel improved from their original incarnations, the game always looked gorgeous and stylish, the new mechanics are interesting and allow for a whole bunch of exciting course designs, and the racing feels as fun as ever and balanced in a way that not every entry in the series has been.
The later DLC and Deluxe version only turned things up a notch, adding another 16 strong courses that stood up to the originals, debuting the new 200cc game mode, and fixing some of the original short-comings (the weak battle mode, a thin roster). And the Booster Pass additions of 2022-23 were maybe not as universally strong as the ones that came before, but there were still some standout levels in there. And moreover, it was a full 48 new courses, doubling the tracklist in what was already the biggest game in the series and revitalizing interest in a game that was over eight years old at that point.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the final version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels more or less like the perfect version of what the series had been doing up to that point. So the obvious question was always: where do you go from there? I think everyone who liked the series thought that. There was always going to be a next Mario Kart entry eventually, so what would that look like?
In the past when I daydreamed about that, I’ve always come up a little blank. I’ve played some competitors in the kart racer subgenre too, and even leaving aside that no other developer teams seem to have Nintendo’s top-tier skills for designing and polishing kart racing games, most of them also didn’t seem to be bringing big new ideas to the table. Do you just continue MK8D’s systems and make some more new tracks? Even if you could work some magic and produce another set of perfect tracks on par with the original base game, if that’s really all Nintendo has to offer, why not just make another MK8 remake and slap those on as a New Booster Pass or something?
And that brings us to ‘Mario Kart World’. World had apparently been in development for something like 8 years, and the big new idea for this installment (or at least, one of them) was to put all of the courses down in one big, interconnected world. I’ve written in the past about Orphaned Mechanics, gameplay ideas that are introduced in one game and then never really touched again, and I would say that this is an idea that falls into that category.
The closest precursor would probably be ‘Diddy Kong Racing’ back on the Nintendo 64, which differentiated itself from the system’s other big kart racer from the previous year* by structuring itself more like a 3D platformer, with a big hub world to drive around in that led to the game’s various courses. Those courses would still be in their own world, which you’d reach through portals, but it’s most of the way there.
*Mario Kart 64 was the second-best selling N64 game, by the way, about 2 million behind Super Mario 64. The series has always been a juggernaut, even if MK8 took it to an absurd level. Diddy Kong Racing also placed a respectable eighth-place on that list, although it still had half of MK64’s sales.
I don’t think anything since then (other than the Diddy Kong remake back on the DS) has come close to that, at least as far as Kart racers go? 2003’s ‘Kirby Air Ride’ on the Gamecube had a big, non-linear hub level to navigate in the City Trial map, but it didn’t actually connect to the individual levels (we’ll see if they decide to follow-up in that direction in the long-awaited sequel later this year).
That’s… about it, really? Really, the better comparison is probably open-world driving games,* although World is still a little off from those. There are still items and course gimmicks and such even in Free Roam mode. And the map is still built around the main tracks (which are clearly Kart Racing courses, rather than attempts to make “real” environments feel like a race locale), even as they kind of stand out from the rest of the game world. Each one serves as a major hub of focus, full of events and missions, and you can actually drive around them in their entirety just as you would if you picked it in a completely unconnected “VS Race” mode.
*I’m less-versed in non-Kart racing games, but my understanding is that even that field is a little stagnant right now? The usual most-recent touchstone I see there is Burnout Paradise, and even the Remaster of that game is seven years old (on top of coming out when the base game was already a decade old).
Actually, that might be one of the bigger things that stands out in my mind. For those who haven’t tried it yet, I think the batch of new courses remains strong. World is pretty directly taking the baton from MK8 in continuing the top-notch design; if there’s a step down at all, it’s largely in quantity, since MK8 had so much time to build up an absurd number of strong courses* while World is just starting at the standard “8 Cups of 4 Races” format (although more on that in a second). 96 great courses is just better than 32 great courses.
*Granted, I think the Booster Pass courses are a little weaker, so it might be better to think of the World races as a “return to form”. That’s not exactly an uncommon opinion, but I’m also more inclined to forgive the Pass’s weakness than some, since I think there were enough clear winners and a full doubling of the already-expanded 48 course total is just so overwhelming that a few falling short of “great” doesn’t pull the experience down very much. Plus, I think the “worst” courses there were the adaptations of the real-world courses from the mobile game, which I think was always going to be a struggle, so I’m inclined to count it as a win just for pulling off such a difficult task.
However! This isn’t actually a straight “96 to 32” comparison. Because those routes in the overworld map that connect all of the hub-courses together? Those actually play a pretty major role in the entire game. For example, when you pick a Grand Prix, you’ll start with a normal three lap race for the first match, but every subsequent one will consist of the entire field of racers booking it down the highways of… (Is this a take on the Mushroom Kingdom? The titular “Mario Kart World”? Something else? I don’t know if it’s ever named), weaving between traffic and picking up coins and items just as you would in a standard race. And, once you finally made it to your destination, each one ends the proceedings with one final lap around the “real” course to close things out.
Setting everything else aside, this is just a huge shift in the Mario Kart formula. Even “Mario Kart 8 plus a new Free Roam Mode” would have probably felt like a worthwhile cause for a new release (rather than just more DLC), but this goes a step beyond, and makes the default mode of the series feel radically different from every other entry in the series. Sure, on the micro level, ‘Mario Kart DS’ played very differently from ‘Mario Kart Wii’, which felt unlike ‘Mario Kart 8’, and so on; but while the specifics changed, the general outline remained the same.
Even ‘Double Dash’, probably the most unique entry due to paired racers and character-specific items, wasn’t that different structurally from the rest at the base. You could pick courses in whatever order you wanted, but each one was still a discrete event, and reversing the order didn’t really change much. But here, even going from, say, Mario Bros Circuit to Crown City (the first two courses in the Mushroom Cup) feels different than going in the other direction. Each route to a location definitely feels distinct in a way that drastically changes the preceding race, and even that final lap around the base course can feel very different depending on things like where the highway connects into it.
I will also note: this is the other reason the “96 tracks to 32 tracks” comparison is wrong. There are technically only 30 of the “traditional” courses, but the game makes use of the number of variations. Two different courses reappear in new forms later in the game, and they even feel different enough that it doesn’t stand out much in the moment. Early on, I actually spent a little bit of time in free race menus looking for “the other city course” before realizing it was just Crown City a second time (although the game’s ability to switch up things like weather and lighting can also help this, too).
On a related note, this decision also enables another major new mode, “Knockout Tour”, which is just one long, non-stop trip across the length of the map. It’s wild how different this mode feels even from Grand Prix, despite being made of all the same courses just in different arrangements (albeit with that final lap around each destination removed). There’s no breaks in between, no single laps to mark each major destination as you reach it, just what feels like the Mario Kart equivalent of a long-distance cross country race.
It all kind of makes it impossible to directly compare World to MK8. I don’t think the Highways are, individually, as good or interesting as any of the main tracks in either game. Really, there were points while playing where I wished the game de-emphasized them a little, because it can feel like it takes away from the better-designed section of the map; in short, “I’d rather do 3 laps around the actual track rather than 2 ‘laps’ of highway chase and 1 lap around the actual track”. They tend to be long and straight, which can make for less interesting courses when compared to the distinct twists and turns that Mario Kart as a series is more known for.
Perhaps even greater a loss is the relative lack of theming compared to the 30 base courses. That’s historically been another series strong point, with Nintendo happy to dive into the outright fantastic to deliver memorable worlds like Sweet Sweet Canyon, or Neo Bowser City, or Ribbon Road, or Thwomp Ruins, or Tick Tock Clock… Basically, anything you imagine as a setting for a race course can be done without limits, since there’s no need to connect everything logically when it’s just distinct, individual races.
I thought that might be changed with Mario Kart World’s insistence on connecting everything, but… not really? They still get rather fantastical, dipping into ideas like the treat world of Sky-High Sundae, or the flying battleships of Airship Fortress, or the Great ? Block Ruins hidden in the clouds. That latter one is a pretty direct continuation of Thwomp Ruin’s themes, actually; the course designs really aren’t that much more grounded here than they’ve been in the past.
The entire issue here is really just that the highways aren’t as weird; they’ll occasionally give you some fun and beautiful setpiece moments, like the large bridge into Crown City, or the sandbar tying into Peach Beach, or the haunted boardwalk outside of Boo Cinema, or the drainage halfpipe leading to Airship Fortress, or so on.* The issue is that it’s not really one-to-one; there are over 75 connecting routes (finding an official count is difficult, but it’s definitely above that), and while some of them have big moments that make them almost feel like full courses, others just don’t get anything to stand out. For a lot of them, the biome is the most distinctive feature. Maybe the first time you suddenly find yourself entering a snowy mountain pass, it catches your attention; but there are three different courses in the Ice biome, and all of their connecting routes don’t stand out as much from each other as you start seeing more of them (to say nothing of the numerous highways through deserts or rolling green hills).
*You may note that some of these sound suspiciously like older Mario Kart tracks, and I have to believe that is intentional. They usually aren’t direct recreations of older levels, but they’re happy to use them as inspirations. And I kind of think that might have been the secret to sprucing up some of the more boring routes, actually? One small thing to help individual routes stand out from each other could go a long way. Just give one highway the electric floors of the Electrodome or Waluigi Pinball, or an unexplained clock motif, or maybe pepper the road with large mushrooms, or have you cut between Block Forts… I don’t know, maybe that would have still been too much labor or stuck out from the world map a little too much, but I think that’s one of the benefits of making these small call-back sections, you can get a big effect with a little less effort (compared to coming up with 70-ish entirely new gimmicks).
And yet… despite those gripes, I also can’t deny that World has given me a lot more replayability and enjoyment than the basic Mario Kart format. Once I got the Switch version of Mario Kart 8, I basically never touched the normal “Versus” race mode, because I had played all of the courses before so many times; even their amazing designs could only take me so far. I basically replayed the Grand Prix cups to get the star rankings, and even then, I remember it straining my interest a little, with my attention veering as soon as more Switch games were released. The only real reason to use it was multiplayer racing.
That is absolutely not the case in World. I wouldn’t say the free pick VS. Race mode has been my most-used one, but it has absolutely held its own, even against the big ticket draws of Grand Prix, Free Roam, and Knockout Races, which is kind of amazing the more that I think about it. It helps that this is the only mode that allows you to play back-to-back three-lap versions of the courses (which is unfortunate, but I’ll say more on this in a moment), but it also allows you to choose from any of the route variations leading to your course, too. If it’s on the Free Roam map, it’s fair game. In fact, there’s even a connection option that you can toggle, forcing you to set up your picks like a custom Grand Prix so that one course leads into the next.
There’s a lot of fun just lining up the courses in different orders and seeing how each variant feels. Yeah, technically you could just drive across all of these routes in Free Roam, but that lacks the urgency or direction of the actual races. Free Roam is for goofing around, seeing the sights, chasing down sidequests and such. The actual races on these segments are different and still feel fun, even if none of them quite reaches the highs of the main courses.
It just feels really exhilarating, doing an extended chase through traffic on a Mario World-version of a highway (maybe not as twisty and turny as a normal level, but still a little winding and with regular items and obstacles), seeing the course come into view as you power-slide around the final turn or crest the final hill or whatever else, and having the soundtrack smoothly switch over* into that level’s theme as the minimap zooms in from the full race to just the final lap around the actual track. Nintendo really nailed making those moments feel monumental, and it does a lot to validate the decision to shift to this style.
*The soundtrack is another big win here, although I don’t know how in-depth I can really cover it. You know how they got a live band to record the Mario Kart 8 soundtrack, and they sounded fantastic? You know how every new song was absolute fire, and every re-arranged classic they brought back felt completely revitalized? Yeah, they did all of that again in World. It continues to absolutely rock, maybe even more than the last one. The biggest difference here is the sheer volume; the Mario Wiki claims there are over 200 arrangements. You get some wild variety just driving around in Free Roam, and it’s especially great if you’re a longtime fan of the Mario series’ soundtracks. The biggest specific comment I have beyond the sheer volume and quality of the music is that final lap switch from whatever was playing on the route (for the highway segments, it generally picks a random track from any of the many songs that aren’t another specific track’s theme) into the destination course’s main theme, which always sounds smooth and never fails to pump me up; it’s like the traditional third-lap sped-up remix you used to get, but even better.
While the wide variety of playstyles is a huge breath of fresh air, it also kind of makes me wish that they had gone a little further and made things totally modular for Vs. Mode. For example, you can’t really make your own Knockout Tour in the way you can a Grand Prix; every route race you pick needs to end with one full lap around the destination. Or it would be nice to flip things around, and start with a lap around the track before finishing with the highway chase segment, allowing you to make the final track of your set a full three-lap race. And honestly, finding an excuse for traditional three-lap races would also probably be nice, even if it’s a separate mode; I know the online lobbies have been running into some issues there already.*
*For those not in-the-know: basically, everyone was picking “Random” in the course selection since it was the only way to be guaranteed the traditional three-lap race… so Nintendo patched the service a few weeks in to add the highway courses to the random pool as well, which seems to have infuriated a lot of players. We’ll see how this develops over time, but it feels like something is going to have to change here in the long term.
Those are the most obvious ideas, all of which feel like they could be achieved with minimal effort? At the very least, it’s not like any of them would require devising alternate routes. But it’s also not hard to start daydreaming on top of that. Like, I’ve been messing around in Free Roam, and found that you can drive a lot of the courses backwards; could that be a full alternate mode, something akin to Mirror Mode? Or there are some alternate pathways that you only see on specific intermissions, when the route into a track connects in an unusual way and guides you through some of the back roads around the arena. It’s a shame those are locked to only certain intermissions, usually without even noting the ones where that applies.
Of course, you can go even deeper: the areas around the courses are fully fleshed out in Free Roam on top of that, frequently showcasing alternate paths through the area thanks to missions; how hard would it be to create alternate versions of each track? The city tracks from Mario Kart 8 and Tour already experimented with alternate courses through the same level, so why couldn’t they try that again here?* It’s kind of shocking just doing laps around the bleacher roof of Wario Stadium, or the ocean around Koopa Troopa Beach, or the concourse around Peach Stadium, or so many other areas in the game, and realizing that they just don’t really show up in any actual races.
*And quite frankly, the signage actually directing you through those alternate routes feels much better and easier to read mid-race in World than it did in 8, where it was one of my major complaints against those levels.
Maybe it’s a big ask, but Nintendo has been leaning harder on things like player creativity and freedom lately, between the game designs of Super Mario Odyssey and Pokemon Scarlet/Violet and your cadre of open-ended Zeldas (speaking of), and the extreme end being things like LABO or that VR Mario Kart: Home Circuit game they made a few years ago. For another example, I just realized this is the first new mainline Mario Kart entry since the Mario Maker series debuted, as wild as that is to think about.
Letting players stake out full courses on the Free Roam map might be too extreme to dream about*, but adding variations of courses could at least capture some of that energy. And if nothing else, it would be an easy way to expand the course total a little more beyond just the dozens of connecting route courses (and I imagine the player base would prefer them a little more as well). And the actual level is already there, it’s not like it would require a ton of new asset creation or anything… I don’t know, it’s probably not fair of me to expect something like that, so I don’t let it factor into my evaluation of the actual game too much, but the thoughts are there in the back of my mind, at least.
*Maybe not though? I keep waffling on this because I feel like I don’t have any good estimate of the effort it would require. The first Mario Maker entry was a Wii U game that blew everyone’s mind when it was announced, and it was released the year after MK8. The second entry is already over half a decade old! And they toyed with Zelda-style dungeon creation in the Link’s Awakening remake… I wouldn’t get my hopes up for this feature in MKW, but I also can’t convince myself that it’s completely unthinkable in the way it seemed back at MK8’s release, for example.
I feel like all of this has been focused on the big systems of the game, rather than the smaller moment-to-moment gameplay, which makes sense. This is probably the biggest shift in those things in series history, while the driving in the series is pretty much always fine. Nintendo has had years to figure out that end of things, and has basically always been at the leading edge of the kart racing genre as far as “how driving actually feels”.
Nevertheless, the individual Mario Kart games can still feel very different from each other, thanks to both the new gimmicks introduced in each game and all of the tinkering with the recurring mechanics between entries. In the end, some versions of Mario Kart simply feel better to drive around and race in than others.
Personally, I think I put Mario Kart 8 as the best the series has ever felt in that regard, and most other opinions I’ve seen put it somewhere at the upper end of the spectrum, often in the top three. So no matter what, World was going to have its work cut out for it. Any change was likely going to make things feel worse, because MK8 was already basically at the top of its game, delicately balanced over multiple versions and many years. Yet you simply couldn’t just re-use the system that 8 built, partly because no other Mario Kart sequel has done that and some iteration is going to be expected, but also because the big new additions demanded it in some way. Expanding the field of racers to 24 would upset the item balance that 8 tried desperately to achieve, while the open world design meant that there wasn’t much of a place for the zero-gravity racing mechanics in level design.
Those are probably the two biggest areas where World’s gameplay stands out for the worse. Let’s start with the items, because that’s the easiest one to understand, and also the one that will literally jump out at you in a playthrough. 24-player races are crowded, but the courses are built around that. The wider lanes and multiple alternate routes through each course mean you never feel like you’re being pushed off the map. And resources (both coins and items) are plentiful enough and regenerate quickly enough that you won’t feel like you’re losing out simply through resource denial, as the masses shove you out of the way and try to leave you with nothing. No, there’s always enough for you to pick up.
…Which means there’s enough for EVERYONE to pick up, all 24 members of the field. If you’ve heard one thing about how the races feel, it’s probably that they can become very aggressive very quickly, especially to anyone in first place. The items maybe felt a little aggressive at times in 8, but the average World race can regularly match that level or worse. Getting nuked by a blue shell or series of red shells in the final half-lap feels like a regular occurrence, almost expected. And it doesn’t help that the defensive item play of 8 is also reworked slightly, generally in ways that give frontrunners fewer options to try and protect themselves.
I don’t mind Mario Kart having items, I think they’re a key part of the series identity, knowing how to play defense with them or dodge the issue is a bit of a skill in and of itself, and in the absolute worst case, having luck occasionally decide the results of a race isn’t the worst thing. However… it still feels a little extreme in World. “Occasionally” isn’t “every other race has a major unavoidable attack in the homestretch”. I’m only an okay racer, so I kind of wondered for a while if there was something I wasn’t getting or if even the weaker computer-controlled racers were buffed or something. But a lot of chatter I’ve seen from higher-level players has been around whether intentionally hanging back for better items to make late pushes is an optimal strategy, which tells me this can’t just be on my end.
The other part of the issue here is that World has also made it a lot harder for frontrunners to build a lead with some cushioning. The item battles in 8 could also get intense at times, but the final line of defense in a bad situation was usually “build up a big enough lead that you can remain competitive after a blue shell”. That doesn’t really seem to work in World, both in my own experience and talking to others.
I think part of the problem is that the computer racers rubber band to the leader a little harder, but the game’s mechanics also seem to be limiting that skill too in a variety of ways. Top speeds and drifting boosts seem limited, as do the effects of coins (both in the speed of maxing out your coin count, and in the fact that the limit has been increased from 10 to 20, making the boost of each individual one smaller). Pathing doesn’t seem to separate racers out as much either, although I’m unsure why? The extra racers seem to give trailing characters more chances to draft boost, but that also doesn’t seem like the biggest cause. I’m not sure if all of those are right, and even for the ones that I am confident exist, I’m still not sure how much each factor contributes to the overall feel on its own.
But I think the other big cause here is that the big new mechanics of World, wall-riding and grinding, don’t really provide the same speed benefits of past Mario Kart gimmicks. Obviously, you don’t want things that are too easy to abuse (past mechanics like snaking in DS and wheelies in Wii where maybe a little too easy to break out at any time, with the right set-up), but the skill ceiling of these new abilities doesn’t seem quite right at the moment.
Simply put, the benefits are too small, given the other trade-offs working against them. A large chunk of the walls and guardrails that you can ride on are on the outside edge of the race course, which de facto means taking a really inefficient route. The speed boost that you gain isn’t enough to offset the fact that you’re taking the widest possible turn possible, and cutting the turn sharper will usually just serve you better. You could try taking the opposite side, but you can’t really ride the inner walls as well since a concave wall works better than a convex one (in fact, they have a high chance of flinging you off to the outside edge of the course when you trick off of them anyway), and even the inner rails too often turn into the outer part of an S-curve, turning things inefficient again.
Of course, even if you could mitigate the often-inconvenient placement, as it turns out, both methods are just flat out slower than driving normally; you’ll find sections with straight-line rails next to regular track, and those serve as a live demonstration that driving on flat ground is faster than rail- or wall-riding in the long run. The advantage of the new techniques is that you get a small boost when you start your wall/rail-ride before it peters out into something slower, and then you can get more small boosts like that by stringing together more tricks as you go. However, those will often take you off the rail or wall entirely, which does still speed you up, but it can also shoot you off in ways that affect your steering, and even if you’re careful about that, it still means you’re right back to just driving normally…
The time savings of this new mechanic don’t feel as huge. There are a few places you can cut off a corner here or there if you know the route well (although, again, the straighter highway sections don’t seem to use that design quite as much anyway), and you can of course learn the sections with scenery that that allows you to string together a bunch of tricks. There are also some alternate routes that make use of the verticality wall-riding enables, and some of those have extra item blocks or speed-up pads. Maybe there will even be shortcuts there, although some of them are slightly longer too (on top of being riskier, because missing your trick will often just put you right back on the ground floor, but on the outer edge of the track and with a drop in your speed) and just try to make up for it with those goodies. A lot of the time, it was more convenient to just avoid the big new gimmick of Mario Kart World, in a way that you really couldn’t with past entries.
(I should also add, the game is still new, and so strategies are still actively being developed. Also, I am not nearly skilled enough as a player that I will be the one leading the charge in that department. Maybe in a year or two, even a total amateur like me will be mastering these little flips and wallrides in a way that I never even imagined right now. However, that’s not the case right now, and I’ve gotta work with what I’ve got.)
You may ask what the point even is then, and the obvious answer is that it’s as much for Free Roam as it is the actual races. There’s no point to always going as fast as possible there, but there is a lot of appeal in exploring the full verticality that courses can offer, either for the sake of collectibles or just to see if you can make it somewhere as a personal challenge. Or even if you aren’t exploring, it’s just fun as hell driving off a ramp, landing on a guard rail, flipping over to the nearby wall, riding that around a curve, flipping back to a powerline, driving along that for a while above the traffic below you while doing small flips for extra speed…
It’s basically the entire system that skateboarding games like the Tony Hawk series are built around. Who cares if you drop from first place to third if you look sick as hell flipping all around the map and finding out new places you can reach in the process? And if you care a little too much about the races to try that sort of thing, you have an entire mode to do that sort of thing instead. Who cares about going the fastest in a predetermined circle when you can just go somewhere, anywhere else?*
*I don’t know if it’s fully a 3D platformer, the Tony Hawk comparisons just feel a little more apt, but I would say that Mario Kart World is at least 3D Platformer Adjacent. But as a brief aside for the sake of something a little less famous than a Nintendo game: if you’d like to see a full 3D Platformer about driving a car, I’d definitely recommend the 2024 indie game Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom by developers Panik Arcade. It has a lot of fun with that idea, and also takes some inspiration from games like Crazy Taxi. I may even write about it later, if I have time! Maybe in a future follow-up on Genre Mash-Ups or something?
Those are basically the two guiding principles that I keep running into when I try to summarize my evaluation of Mario Kart World. It couldn’t just be Mario Kart 8 again even if it meant straying from the path of the “perfect” Mario Kart game, and a lot of the places where it may fall short in that regard make more sense in the context of what it decided to bring to the table instead (particularly the Free Roam world map). It kind of makes for the perfect tandem. Even when I might find myself frustrated or let down by the racing side, it’s easy enough to just take a break from it and pop over to the map for a while.
I really do love this map. It’s just all-around gorgeous to explore, picturesque biomes each given a distinct almost fantasy-level feel, then slapped with a slightly more realistic (for a Mario game) filter, just enough to make them almost seem like real places that you could go to. It repeatedly delivers beautiful scenery as you drive along, taking advantage of the stronger Switch 2 visuals to deliver striking landscape shots any time that you stop to take things in for a moment. It also helps that driving just feels so good (especially when you don’t have twenty-three other racers constantly chucking shells at the back of your head), so just navigating the space makes for this perfect synergy of smoothly cruising around, vibing to the perfect soundtrack and taking in the sights of this weird island. It’s hardly the first game to master that energy, but it absolutely does master it (on top of the specific Mario Kart perks it adds, like the ability to use mushrooms to just zip around traffic)
There are also things to do beyond just vibing, though! Of course, you can unlock costumes for most of the racers, although you can also do that during normal intermission races too; doing it in free roam is just a little quicker. Switches also litter the landscape, each one giving you a unique challenge to show off your racing skills in some way. You also get plenty of collectibles to seek out, primarily in the form of ? pads (which usually encourage exploration into off-the-path nooks and crannies of the race track hubs) and large Peach medallions (which are usually more visible, but instead encourage you to perform tricks or otherwise maneuver yourself to the top of something). There are also large piles of coins, and all of them give you neat little collectibles upon completion, in the form of stickers that you can slap by your name.
Granted, there’s not really a benefit to getting all of the stickers, as you can only use one at a time (and you’ll probably find a few sets you like more anyway and stick with them; I tend to default to the Sunshine Railway, Koopa Festival, and Sky-High Sundae Sweets sets). They’re mostly small dopamine hits for doing tasks. And really, the game isn’t super great about telling you what you have left to do, either (the ? Pads are given checkboxes on the map, but not the other two things). It might be nice to get a little more guidance in a future update, but I mostly think that’s not really the main point of Free Roam mode?
They’re nice little incentives, don’t get me wrong, and providing some direction is nice. But they’re ultimately closer to a lot of the smaller shrines in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or something; you see them in the distance as you’re running around the landscape, maybe giving you a goal to chase down and a prize if you decide to tackle it. But the biggest driver of behavior is more based on your innate desire to explore and see what this fantasy world has to offer.
I actually find it kind of rewarding? For as much as I complained earlier about how I wished the routes felt different… they actually kind of do in some ways, they’re just a little more subtle, and you can only notice them when you have the freedom to slow down and poke around.
For example, while I was puttering around the Toad’s Factory area, I noticed an elevated highway over the adjacent lake that was built on top of big, green warp pipes. It was a really cool thing to just stumble upon! Of course, I also realized that I had absolutely driven over that section on an intermission race, but the only way you would have seen what made the route special was looking at it from the side. You kind of lose that light touch when you’re zipping around towards a goal line, so they probably needed something bigger that stands out in those high-speed moments, but at least seeing them in Free Roam adds a lot.
There are just a whole bunch of things like that all over the World map, and at least some of your enjoyment will come from wandering around, observing your surroundings, and appreciating the cool stuff you find. Maybe if you’re more of a mission- and goal-oriented gamer, this won’t be as much your cup of tea, but it was absolutely right up my alley.
If I have any gripes about this, they’re less about the experience as a whole and more about the smaller, individual choices made along the way. The biggest, most general one is probably that “why wasn’t the route theming a little bolder” idea, but there are a few other points. I think Desert Hills is kind of a weak spot of both the track list and the world map, and probably could have been replaced. I like Koopa Troopa Beach as an area, but wish the track itself and that chunk of the map had gotten a little more added; it feels relatively underdeveloped as-is. I understand why they only included 30 tracks, but I really do think the map could have done with another level or two on it, although I go back and forth on what specifically (retro or new, what type of biome, etc.*) should have been added. Really, though, these complaints feel less like full complaints, and more like giving it a score of 95/100.
*Since I’m already kind of treating this piece a little bit as a fantasy wishlist, I may as well do a quick detour through my thoughts here as an aside (feel free to skip ahead to the break though, this part is less to make a serious point about Mario Kart World and more for me to indulge my daydreaming a little more). The current balance is 16 new courses and 14 retro, so 2 retro additions makes sense while also making things a little easier for us. In my opinion, the biggest “need” for the map, the thing that I keep coming back to the most, is “there needs to be a little more in the way of man-made courses”. The more naturalistic courses are pretty and fun to race around, but they do feel a little more dominant in the overall balance, and I think going to something more populous feels a little better on the map.
Ideally, we’d even get something like Crown City, which is one of my favorite hubs to race around. Maybe something like Electrodome, or Coconut Mall, or Neo Bowser City, or Daisy Hills, or Delfino Square… I actually think Super Bell Subway from the initial Mario Kart 8 DLC might be the most fun pick, since trains are a recurring feature of the existing map and it provides us with a lot of opportunities for rails and walls to ride. Also, there are no retro picks here from MK8 (if you count Sky-High Sundae as a Tour pick), so it would help spread out our representation a little more. You could even do something fun where you set it “under” the main world (with a few different highways leading to it by way of above-ground stations that take you below ground), letting you leave a lot of the existing world map as-is.
I flip-flop a lot more on which biomes need more attention, and whether it would be better to take a course with a unique vibe and add something else (like the Haunted Woods or Savanna areas), or keep those special and work with the bigger areas, but I usually lean toward the latter. I like the Mesa setting, where Mario Bros. Circuit and Whistlestop Summit are set, and I wish a little bit more was there, plus I think it gives us some great retro options. You could bring back MK8’s Shy Guy Falls, or Super Circuit’s Sunset Wilds (since the GBA game is the other series entry currently without a Retro course pick; plus the MK8 Booster Pass version of this one was underwhelming and it could be nice to take a better crack at it), or Wii’s Wario Gold Mine (although that one feels a little overdone now). A mine environment would be a series classic, and they did a lot of interesting things in other World courses building up those sort of industrial outposts into bustling areas that feel entirely new.
Alternatively, they could just outright add another metropolis locale via Mushroom City (one of the few remaining Double Dash courses that has never come back). That would even give you some fun options to remake it, especially if you try to blend it in with its surroundings and/or make it a more radical reinterpretation (like Wario Stadium or Desert Hills). Maybe you plop it in at the edge of the Mesa and Desert area, and make it feel like a big city springing out of the desert, like Las Vegas or Los Angeles. Or if you decide that’s too close to Crown City, you could do the same thing with another section of the map, having it just outside the wooded hills to the north, or in the foothills of the snowy mountains to the northeast. Or it could be fun to do something really drastic, like plopping that layout in the swampy jungles in the southeast and redesigning the buildings around it to look like New Orleans.
Or, another fun idea that my brother sold me on was MK8’s Yoshi’s Island. It’s a lovingly rendered bit of nostalgia that didn’t get as much time to shine, since it was in the back half of the Booster Pack, so this would be a great way to give it more exposure. The unique theme would definitely make it an interesting corner of the world to explore, and as an island, it would be very easy to insert it into the overworld while not moving the rest of the map around; just put it off the coast somewhere, maybe off the southeast coast since that part feels a little more open?
—
There is, of course, one other big asterisk hanging over this comparison between the two games: Mario Kart 8 at launch was a different game than it wound up being eleven years later at the end of its life cycle. Sure, the initial core game was still rock-solid; the final form was still contingent on nailing that initial experience, after all. But as I mentioned back in the opening, there were also plenty of gripes around the edges too (like the completely-revamped battle mode, or the underwhelming character roster*), many of which only got fixed in updates or in the Deluxe re-release.
*I had forgotten since the final roster of 8 was so expansive, but upon looking back, it’s actually kind of funny to remember where it started. The initial lineup was 30 characters, but that included 2 metal versions of existing characters, Mario and Peach, and 5 baby characters (both largely seen as gimmicks), plus a spot for Miis (always hit or miss among fans). I even remember some gripes about the Koopalings, and while I like them, I can see why they may wear thin on non-fans, given that they take up nearly a quarter of the starting roster when it already felt like slots were being thrown away. Even the first wave of DLC characters did little to assuage those concerns, given that it balanced Link (the surprising but beloved guest character) with two more alternate versions of Mario and Peach (Tanooki and Cat, respectively).
Even ignoring the tweaks that turned launch weaknesses into later outright strengths, those updates were also still responsible for solidifying 8’s wins and introducing a lot of iconic elements. I hadn’t even realized how much tweaking went on under the hood of the game’s kart stats system between the base game and Deluxe until I started looking into things for this piece, and it’s been so long since I’ve played the base game that I had to go confirm that the double-item system and max turbo boosts weren’t introduced until the Switch. 200cc, the only major new mode of MK8 and perhaps its signature new element, was part of a post-game update. I think that those first four DLC cups (the Egg, Triforce, Crossing, and Bell Cups) are where the game went from “arguably the best course lineup in the series” to “definitely the best”, in no small part because of the extra quantity on top of the initial quality (before we got the icing on the cake of the Booster Pass courses).
Right now, just comparing the launch versions of the two games… I think it’s even or a slight lean in World’s favor? MK8’s base 32 courses were a little stronger, and the total racing system was a little better feeling, but the differences there were by no means monumental. Meanwhile, I think all of the new modes and Free Roam content in World are a big advantage; there just feels like there’s so much more to do. They’re close enough though that I can see opinions differing, especially if the Free Roam mode does nothing for you or your biggest concern is the specifics of how the racing feels.
Will Mario Kart World get that kind of post-launch support that 8 did? It’s impossible to know for sure just one month in; for as common as it’s become within the industry, Nintendo does still occasionally just leave their games as-is. And given how the entire game is built around the interconnected overworld map, that does lead to some major questions like “where would you add new courses”. For all of my gripes about how there are ideas that the game could throw additional focus on with new courses, I’m not actually sure where you’d put those courses. The map right now feels just about complete.
All that said, I still have my doubts that we’ve seen everything. It would be a little shocking for Nintendo to completely ignore their shiny new system’s big launch title, especially when that will be an easy way to revive interest in it down the road. I’m sure they can find a way to include new courses, even if it’s something like putting them on a smaller, separate island. And even leaving all of those aside, there are a few other elements that leave me suspicious: one big example is that the only playable characters in the game with just one costume aren’t generic enemies like Shy Guy or Lakitu, but named stars Donkey Kong and Pauline. And hey, would you look at which two characters are starring in a big new game a month and a half after World’s release…
Costumes seem like the kind of thing that would be trivially easy to add post-launch, and new characters seem to work basically the same way as individual costumes, so I wouldn’t be shocked if we see some of those as well (again, for starters, series regular Diddy Kong also shows up in that Bananza trailer…). Rule changes and balance patches also seem like a given, and we’ve already seen them tweak some rules, but changing what courses can be picked for online races is a little different than totally overhauling the game balance. They almost certainly aren’t going to tear out the base build of the game and start over, but I also don’t think it’s bad enough that they need to. In fact, it’s possible that some smaller changes plus a more developed understanding of the game’s new trick system and other mechanics combine to make the game feel very different and much more natural.
On the other hand, I’m ultimately a little skeptical that patch changes could fix every issue that I have with World, in the way that happened with Mario Kart 8’s later updates. The areas where a fix would be easiest to add in don’t seem to line up quite as perfectly with the areas where there are actual problems, in the way that happened with 8.
Also, the need to tie everything into the overworld means that there might be some complications in adding courses, which are I think probably the single greatest component to an entry’s success. Their launch lineups might be close, but the new entry will have to add at least a few things if it’s going to measure up to MK8’s bulk of offerings in the long run. If that doesn’t happen, it’s going to particularly stand out coming on the heels of an entry that was so abundant and well-supported in tracks.
But I also think the developers are aware of that, and will come up with something there. And while I don’t want to take more extreme additions for granted, I feel like there’s a lot of potential for World to drop new ways to play the game, in the same way that 200cc revolutionized its predecessor. Even if the root problems are only slightly addressed, it’s possible that later updates turn World’s biggest strengths into an embarrassment of riches. It’s also difficult to imagine without any specifics, but given World’s fairly unique take on things, it could also make it an even more interesting and potentially-polarizing entry in the series. But we’ll just have to cross those bridges when we come to them.
Where does that leave us right now, though? It was always inevitable that Mario Kart World was going to get compared to its predecessor, and comparisons to 8 were always going to be an uphill drive. Even if World is worse in some key areas (like the balance of the racing or the map pool), I respect them more for taking it in a new direction than I would have if they just turned in “Mario Kart 8 Version 3.0” (not to mention that the baseline level for the Mario Kart series is high enough that the game still feels great to play… just less-great than 8).
However, all of the new variety from things like Free Roam and Knockout Races is enough to really give World its own identity, and I think that decision gives it a real opportunity to grow into its own, especially as more content is released and a deeper understanding of the game is developed. And again, I’m not sure if those things will ever match what came before it, but I think being it’s own thing is firmly a win. It will always give you a reason to return just to try the things specific to it, and even if it remains less-popular on the whole, you’ll always win more people over and get your own appreciation by doing your own thing like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment