Mario Kart World Review

It’s a testament to Mario Kart World’s quality that I’ve spent over 35 hours with it since launch less than a week ago, yet I still can’t wait to play more. The first brand-new Mario Kart in over a decade is a breath of fresh air, but oddly enough, the biggest reasons it works so well aren’t actually its shiny new features. When I’m racing through one of World’s excellent traditional courses, dodging shells while trying to hang onto the lead, it feels like a worthy successor to the immaculate Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. But when I’m somewhat mindlessly roaming around its pleasant but fairly one-note map or puttering down the lengthy straightaways that often separate its Grand Prix tracks, World doesn’t make a convincing case that going open-world was the boost Mario Kart needed. Thankfully, it still thrives on the same foundation the definitive kart racer series built its legacy upon: incredible polish, a phenomenal soundtrack, precise controls that are deep but easily approachable, and a timeless ability to generate local multiplayer magic.

World looks, sounds, and feels marvelous. As the main launch game for Nintendo Switch 2 (sorry, Welcome Tour), there was definitely pressure on World to run well and look amazing, and it delivers. The framerate is a rock-solid 60fps in single-player either docked or handheld, and its performance holds up when driving across the entirely interconnected map with no loading screens. The graphics aren’t mind-blowing or anything, but the slightly more exaggerated art style looks really nice on both a 4K TV and the 1080p Switch 2 screen itself, and World benefits from the improved resolution of Nintendo’s new hardware. To quote a famous Miiverse poster, World’s “amazing-looking water” (which reacts to items like a Blue Shell explosion!) really makes me want a new Wave Race.

Racing on 150cc feels outstanding mechanically, and while the drifting isn’t quite as tight as in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, I started to really enjoy the new feel once I got used to it. I also don’t miss customizing my kart at all; the wide selection of karts, bikes, trikes, and sleds look great and save everyone some time compared to having to choose a body, wheels, and glider. There’s an understandable adjustment period after 11 years of the same Mario Kart, but I’m already happy with how World feels and excited to dedicate this console generation to mastering its intricacies. It’s also filled with delightful little details, like the way your kart wiggles around when you move the control stick, how rain begins to fall after someone uses a lightning bolt, or the adorable animations each character performs when tricking off a jump.

The Nintendo charm is here in full force, and the clear standout of World’s atmosphere is its remarkable soundtrack. Nintendo promised over 200 brand-new arrangements for Mario Kart World, and every note helps write a love letter to Mario history with nods to classic scores from the SNES like Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi’s Island, odes to pretty much every past Mario Kart, and great, fresh tunes to accompany the new courses. We don’t know if we’re getting a proper Mario platformer this year to commemorate the original Super Mario Bros.’ 40th anniversary, but even if we aren’t, this soundtrack is a dream come true for a longtime Nintendo fan like me and a great celebration of our favorite plumber and his friends.

This is also where the first of many strange decisions Nintendo has made arrives. Various selections from the soundtrack play when driving around in Free Roam or during the highway segments of a race, but there’s no way to listen to specific favorites. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe didn’t have that at launch either, but eventually added a music player so you could listen to its big band soundtrack. Super Smash Bros. historically gives you control over which songs play on each stage, and even Super Mario Odyssey eventually let you pick what you wanted to hear, so it’s baffling that World doesn’t provide this choice at launch.

Nintendo calls its music selections a “Jukebox” in World, but in practice it’s more like a radio with only one station: if you fall in love with a song you hear once, you just have to hope the DJ eventually plays it again. Of course, there’s always the chance that Nintendo adds this feature in an update or drops the soundtrack on its official music app – or you could just go on YouTube to listen to an upload of it (Quiet! No one tell!) – but it’s a huge missed opportunity to not let us set our own road trip playlist right from the start.

A Whole New World

World takes big swings to reinvent the established Mario Kart formula, including doubling the amount of simultaneous racers from 12 to a chaotic 24 and expanding the trick system with flashy stuff like wall riding and rail grinding. But the most consequential shakeup is its vast open world, which contains all but one of its 30 wonderful racing circuits (and trust me, we’ll talk about that one exception later). The courses are connected by a series of roads ranging from remote dirt paths to fully developed highways packed with traffic. Nearly every mode in Mario Kart World makes use of these stretches of highway, to varying degrees of success.

Grand Prix has undergone a huge transformation to fit the open-world format, and I’m not a big fan of the changes. Instead of completing three laps on four separate courses, you play the first track the old-school way, but for subsequent races you drive to the next course on two laps’ worth of highways and then complete just one full lap on the actual stage once you arrive. This is where one of World’s biggest problems comes into play: after the initial novelty wears off, those highway sections aren’t nearly as interesting or memorable as the contained courses themselves, and you’ll spend a serious amount of time on the interstate if you want to go for three gold stars on all eight cups.

The highways aren’t bad – in fact some of them can be very fun – but they’re often extremely wide and straight, leading to long portions of each race that aren’t as demanding or enjoyable as the twists and turns of the dedicated levels. There are still threats to consider, as the added madness of 24 total racers means there are a lot more shells and banana peels flying around, but this results in large chunks of each race that are less about knowing your lines and executing perfect turns and more about just trying to stay out of the havoc caused by your opponents. It’s still a hoot when it’s your friends creating that chaos, but in single-player specifically, Grand Prix doesn’t hold the same staying power for me as it did in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, where I was always motivated to improve my own performance just for the joy of doing so.

The main way World tries to keep your attention is with rail grinding, wall riding, and charge jumping, which are a trio of mechanics I’m honestly still wrapping my head around. That’s not a product of a rushed review period, to be clear – I legitimately think it might take months for people to squeeze the full potential out of these new techniques, and it could be a bigger game changer for high-rank online matches than anyone realizes yet. Much like the rest of World, these parkour options aren't as interesting on the intermission highway segments, but it’s a completely different story on the tracks themselves. I’ve seen some completely busted Time Trial ghosts that use rails and walls to find crazy shortcuts that are hidden in plain sight, and that’s inspired me to push these new toys to their limit. But for less-intense sections, sometimes just going straight is your best option, and you have to learn which rails are good and which ones actually make you lose ground on a track-by-track basis.

To its credit, World does try to spice up the straightaways in other ways, too, with boost pads, cars that spit out items, and enemies that launch projectiles. There are definitely great moments to be found, like when you have to outmaneuver a giant dragon swimming through the ocean. But after dozens of repeat play sessions, I’m consistently struck by the feeling that there are still a few too many instances where you just hold A and don’t do much else on the way to the next course, and I’m finding these sections are starting to feel like my daily commute.

Fortunately, you’re almost always in for a treat when you do arrive at your final destination. The more time I spend with World’s lineup of 30 tracks, the more impressed I am with it. At the very least, it matches the quality of the 32 courses Mario Kart 8 included at launch. I have several early favorites, including Great ? Block Ruins, which has you bouncing off clouds and making sharp U-turns through a gorgeous golden temple in the sky that’s filled with high-level shortcuts. Then, there’s the adrenaline rush of the new Bowser’s Castle, a test of your ability to handle high speeds that’s led to the most exciting finishes I’ve seen. Another standout is Peach Stadium, which has celebratory vibes that make it the perfect track to kick off a set with friends. There’s plenty of variety, too, as several courses make use of World’s plane and boat modes – solid replacements for the gliding and underwater abilities from Mario Kart 7 and 8. My favorite part about the boat sections is getting a free trick off of each wave and after your boat dips into the water – it’s so satisfying, every time.

Strong reimaginings of returning courses are here, too, including wonderful renditions of Airship Fortress, Toad’s Factory, Dino Dino Jungle, and Wario Stadium, the last of which includes an awesome jump off a ramp fit for a supercross superstar. There are a couple clunkers (if Desert Hills is coming up I’d rather miss my exit), but that is true of any kart racer, and overall I’m thrilled with the lineup and incredibly relieved that the tracks are as fantastic as ever while still somehow fitting into this enormous jigsaw puzzle Nintendo has designed. The highways feed into multiple entrances for nearly every track, depending on the direction you’re coming from, which occasionally leads to different routes held within. As mixed as I am on how it impacts gameplay between courses, the way Nintendo pulled all of this off is an undeniably impressive feat of open-world design.

I could shout out several more tracks I love, but I need to dedicate some time to the best one of them all: Rainbow Road. World’s take on the most iconic video game level around is the best in the series, and my new pick for the greatest Mario Kart track of all time. It’s a masterpiece from start to finish, and I won’t spoil what happens if you haven’t seen it yet, but there’s one particular moment that gives me goosebumps every single time. It’s a finale fit for a major Nintendo game on the level of those in Super Mario Odyssey and Tears of the Kingdom, a real marathon roller coaster ride, and I’m so happy that World rose to the challenge and topped everything that’s come before.

If you’re like me and decide you’re not that into the highway sections, the VS Race mode offers the option to race under the traditional three-lap ruleset, providing its great take on the classic Mario Kart experience I’ve loved for decades. Time Trials also rely on the classic formula, and I’ve had a good time challenging Staff Ghosts and going for personal bests exclusively on the courses without having to bother with the highways. Sadly, there’s no dedicated online lobby where you can play VS Race with only the three-lap rules, so if you’re a big online player, be prepared to race on plenty of intermission segments.

The one place World makes the best use of its interconnected continent is in the Knockout Tour mode, Mario Kart’s new take on an F-Zero 99-style battle royale and one of the highlights of World as a whole. Knockout Tour takes place over five non-stop segments of highway (followed by one lap at a final destination course) with the bottom four drivers getting eliminated from the race at designated cutoff points. The results are thrilling, and Knockout Tour feels like the main piece of evidence to justify the case for the open-world format, as it just wouldn’t have the same level of intensity on a standard Mario Kart track. It’s a thrill to drive through a variety of locations, from arid deserts to snowy switchbacks, as you desperately try to survive the current lap.

I will say, the item balance in Knockout Tour (and to some extent, Mario Kart World in general) can feel very rubber bandy at times – that’s always been true of this series, but it’s even more extreme here. I constantly found shortcuts during the highway sections that allowed me to cut out an enormous amount of the track if I had mushrooms or a star, and it’s not uncommon to jump from 20th place (or worse) to literally first place in an instant if you are handed the right items at the right time. Each Mario Kart finds a different balance between the importance of skillful driving to get ahead and the value of item boxes to help you out, and World’s combination of wide, straight roads and 24 racers leans heavily in the direction of the latter, especially in Knockout Tour.

This can lead to instances where you’re a total sitting duck if you get a bad item draw, which is worsened by the 12 additional drivers in the mix. To account for this, World makes recovery times from attacks like lightning much faster, and even the Bullet Bill isn’t guaranteed to spin you out if it hits you anymore. But you can still get completely overrun in the middle of the pack and find yourself in 24th… only to instantly return the favor and march right back to the front when you get a powerful item of your own. Sometimes Knockout Tour feels more like a game of chance and timing than one of skill, but it’s still a great time if you go in with that expectation, and it can be fun to strategize around the right time to make your move.

And to be fair, Mario Kart has never claimed to be a competitively balanced game – and I still believe the better racer will rise to the top more often than not simply by knowing how to make the best use of the items they get. None of this is bad, just different. But if you’re someone who gets frustrated by the luck-based elements in Mario Kart or Mario Party, you might not be thrilled with the balance World strikes. Right now, sandbagging – where you intentionally hang back to get great items so you can steamroll to the front – is a viable strategy, but we’re so early in the meta that I expect new discoveries and balance patches from Nintendo (as we saw for years in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) to radically change things as we move forward.

It’s Dangerous to Race Alone

No matter the item balance, Mario Kart is always at its best when you throw some friends into the mix, and this entry lives up to its series’ legacy as a fantastic local multiplayer game. Playing Grand Prix and VS Race with three friends might drop the frame rate from 60 to 30, but it’s as fun as Mario Kart multiplayer has always been. World’s most hilarious and exciting moments happen during splitscreen play when four people are on the couch screaming at each other.

Knockout Tour is also very entertaining with people in the same room, although it can be a long wait to get back in a game if someone is knocked out in the first or second round. When you’re eliminated in splitscreen your TV real estate turns into a spectator view, meaning there’s nothing to do but cheer your friends on… or wallow in your defeat. For this reason, I don’t see Knockout Tour becoming a staple at Mario Kart World parties, in the same way that a lot of my casual gaming friends prefer Time over Stock at Smash Bros. nights: everyone gets to play without fear of having to sit out.

When you don’t have friends in the room, though, Knockout Tour is the definitive option for playing online without a group. It’s a blast to race against real people rather than CPUs as you jockey for position, and my online connection has been pretty smooth throughout all of my matches, even on handheld Wi-Fi. While trying to survive against other skilled players, I found myself literally holding my breath and pressing the A button even harder to try and get my kart to the next cutoff point as fast as possible. Ending someone else’s race (and prolonging your own) with a clutch shell throw is a feeling only topped by winning the whole thing, and I could feel my heart pounding when I crossed the finish line in first place for my first online Knockout Tour victory. And when I come up one spot short of qualifying, it strikes the right balance of making me feel just bad enough to want to run it again.

Unfortunately, playing Knockout Tour online also exposes one of my biggest disappointments with World: the online options are pretty barebones. You still can’t group up with your friends before joining a public VS Race – meaning someone pretty much always has to wait a full round to get into the lobby – and Mario Kart 8’s tournament feature is missing entirely. Knockout Tour was dealt the worst hand, where playing with friends online is extremely limited. If you and a friend across the country want to play a round together, the only way to do so is in a private lobby where the rest of the racers are either other friends or bots. You can’t squad up and drop into a public match together, and it’s a shame we can’t experience Knockout Tour in what I can only imagine would be the best way possible.

It’s probably because Nintendo wants to prevent a squad of eight or so friends jumping in and making things less enjoyable for everybody else by coordinating, which is understandable. At the same time, there are ways to work around this issue that other battle royale games figured out years ago, like limiting your party size to just two or three, or adding dedicated ranked and unranked lobbies with different rules. It’s certainly possible Nintendo could fix this in an update, but as of now, it’s shocking that World’s most exciting addition feels so hindered, especially with how much of Switch 2’s marketing has been focused on playing with friends “all together, anytime, anywhere.” Just let me knock my friend out of the race with a red shell!

Speaking of the classic red shell, World’s item toybox introduces some solid additions, but I wouldn’t say there’s anything as groundbreaking as we’ve seen in past entries. I love taking out opponents with the new hammers, which lob a string of projectiles in a straight line that temporarily clutter the track, making them perfect for the many straightaways – but my favorite returning addition to the lineup is the feather, which gives you a jump that serves as a reliable way to leap over gaps, access shortcuts, and (if you have the right timing) dodge incoming red shells. The new Kamek power-up summons waves of Bowser’s minions to muck up the track and makes the lives of the leaders more difficult, and driving through Yoshi’s restaurants to get a boost and potentially a new outfit from a variety of types of Dash Food is a cute touch – but both of these are tied to one of Mario Kart World’s most frustrating choices: the way it handles unlockables.

Unlocking costumes and characters is seriously strange, because it’s essentially completely out of your control. To be clear, I adore the weird roster of characters in World, including off-the-wall additions like Mario Sunshine’s Cataquack and the global superstar that is Cow. But besides the small handful of characters you unlock by winning each cup in Grand Prix, all other unique drivers in World are unlocked when someone uses the Kamek item to transform you into a random character during a race. To get them all, you have to hope you’re on the right track for a character you don’t have, hope an NPC uses the Kamek item, and hope that you’re one of the seemingly randomly selected drivers that gets transformed.

It’s a similar issue for unlocking alternate costumes – which, again, are fantastic – where there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to which food unlocks which costume for which characters. It’s just a massive guessing game. Both the oddly minimalistic map screen and the ridiculous character-select screen (you often have to scroll through pages and pages of costumes to find the character you’re looking for, like Tears of the Kingdom’s unwieldy material menu) tell you which characters still have costumes to unlock, but that doesn’t get you any closer to knowing which foods you need to eat to get them. Yes, you can use the IGN guide to help you figure it out, but there really should have been a better way within World itself. But hey, there’s a Waluigi Vampire outfit called Wampire, so I guess it’s all worth it. My go-to is Mario’s red, white, and blue mechanic outfit with the Famicom logo on the cap; the very dapper Aristocrat King Boo is another big highlight.

Free Roamin’ on the River

I spent plenty of time as the Wampire driving around Free Roam, World’s enjoyable but fairly uninspiring open world exploration mode that litters hundreds of challenges and collectables across the map by way of P Switch missions, Peach Medallions, and ? Panels. P Switch missions are the main draw: their time-limited challenges range from teaching you basic driving techniques to testing your skill at the new parkour mechanics. They are largely fun enough to complete – and some of them are genuinely tough and require multiple attempts – but the dozens I’ve seen each follow one of a handful of repetitive templates: get all the blue coins, reach the goal in time, and so on.

There are a few exceptions to this, like the challenging Special Test of Skill missions, but after just a few hours I felt like I’d seen multiple variations of everything the P Switches have to offer, and there’s a disappointing lack of surprise that permeates the entirety of Free Roam. I am still enjoying snagging the Peach Medallions, however, as they’re often placed in tricky spots that really make you think about how you’re going to get there, which was the main thing I wanted out of this mode. I like Free Roam overall, but I quickly realized it’s more of a chill, fun diversion than World’s main draw, and I mostly pop in for a few minutes here and there in between racing sets.

The frustration sets in, though, when it comes to tracking your progress in Free Roam. There are hundreds of P Switches in the open world, but apart from the total number you’ve completed that’s displayed on the map screen, there is absolutely no way to see your overall progress. My P Switch count is in the triple digits at this point, but I have no concept of what regions I’m done with and where I still need to search. Unless you have a perfect photographic memory and remember every P Switch you’ve done, or you methodically comb through every inch of the map in a snaking pattern, or you – again – use the IGN guide, good luck tracking down every last mission. It’s choices like this that make it apparent Nintendo also considers Free Roam a side dish, and that the racing was always going to be the main course. Similarly, the reward for every objective in Free Roam is a sticker, which look cool but are very limited in use since you can only put one on your kart at a time – and with over 1,000 stickers to earn, it’s a Korok seed-sized undertaking to collect them all, which I’m just not interested in doing at this point.

If I were a kid on summer vacation, Free Roam would probably be my favorite mode. It’s simple, pointless fun to commandeer a semi-truck and cause a huge traffic accident, or see how far I can glide to reach somewhere I’ve never been before. The open world does have that innocent, spirited nature to it, and it’s a great playground for kids to make their own stories. When I was younger, I spent hours driving around in Time Trials in Mario Kart 64 just to see where I could go, so I certainly understand the appeal of getting a more intimate look at the impressively connected world – I just wish there was wider variety in its content, more enticing unlockables, and a better way to track it all. Even with my personal disappointments, I can see Free Roam gaining a similar reputation to something like Kirby Air Ride’s City Trial, because it’s just fun to mess around in and see what you can pull off, and the rewind feature means it’s always worth taking risks to try to find a fancy new shortcut.

But unlike Kirby Air Ride, it’s disappointing that Free Roam is basically nonexistent in local multiplayer. There are workarounds: when you’re waiting in a lobby to start a local wireless or online match you can drive around the open world with up to two players – but this version of Free Roam removes the P Switch challenges from the map, which is basically the whole point. You can still drive around and take pictures together, but with how hard it is to get into local multiplayer Free Roam to begin with, it hardly feels worth it for the compromised experience you get in return. It’s yet another example of how World’s multiplayer sometimes misses the mark in strange ways.

Finally, Battle Mode is here and it’s fine but unspectacular. Balloon Battle and Coin Runners are the only two options, and most of the maps are closed-off sections of existing tracks instead of bespoke battle arenas. It’s better than the unacceptable Battle Mode in the Wii U version of Mario Kart 8, but significantly watered down compared to what we saw in 8 Deluxe. It feels like it’s only here out of obligation, but it’s still completely serviceable if you’re a big fan of popping balloons.

Too much is missing to consider World an outright replacement for 8 Deluxe at the moment – of course, it’s not like we can’t play both of them on Switch 2 whenever we like, so it doesn’t really need to be fully replaced just yet. But I’m hoping this is just the start for Mario Kart World, and that 8 Deluxe’s years of content updates set a precedent for what we can expect here as well. (Nintendo has not mentioned any plans for DLC, but that’s typical this close after launch.) In addition to the annoying multiplayer limitations I mentioned earlier, the lack of the ultra high-speed 200cc mode is a shame, and I’d love to see the custom item menu make a return. You could argue that both of those things weren’t in Mario Kart 8 at launch so we shouldn’t expect them here either, but I would counter by saying 200cc has been a staple in the Mario Kart community for over 10 years at this point, so it wasn’t at all unreasonable to assume it would be here on day one. That being said, World’s bones are so strong that I can see it one day surpassing 8 Deluxe with enough fixes and content updates, even if it’s still trying to catch up to its predecessor before the next checkpoint for now.