Where can Mario Kart go after the sublime Mario Kart 8? That’s the question that we were wondering for the past 7 years, especially as Nintendo stuffed their deluxe best-seller with more and more tracks. The answer is Mario Kart World, an open-world spin on the traditional karting format that seriously mixes things up.
Right off the bat, Mario Kart World feels like putting on a pair of old slippers. It’s an utterly familiar feeling Mario Kart experience from the start, but it doesn’t take long to start spotting the bustle of new additions and extra features.
It starts with the character selector. There’s just a huge number of characters to choose from and their various costumes – these you unlock, it seems, by grabbing food items from roadside diners and then chowing down mid-race, which also transforms your look at that time. Of course you have staples like Mario, Peach, Yoshi, Waluigi, but the character list goes so far down the Mario universe as to just have Cow as a driver, which is as brilliant as it is barmy.
Get on track and you can literally just race it as though it’s Mario Kart 8, but there’s finer details to keep an eye out for. You can still pick up two items at once, but you no longer needing to hold and item behind you for protection as this now happens automatically. You also have the ability to grind on rails, which is trickier than it might look to pull off, wall-ride and more.
There’s some new transformations as well, with the karts all now having a boat or jetski mode to go with the road racing and glider modes.
We’ve played a handful of races with the game’s Grand Prix mode, but it’s not quite like the racing that you know from Mario Karts past. Where the point-to-point races of previous games were rare treats, here that aspect is folded into the main events. The demo build at the hands-on events picked randomly from the Grand Prix side of the game, and each time we found ourselves first racing cross-country until we reached the actual circuit that is home to the race. There’s no new race start at this point, the journey to the race track is as much a part of the race as the actual final circuit, and you might have 1 lap at that circuit, you might have three, or potentially more.
There’s just a huge amount of variety to this new structure, and it will be fascinating to see how it comes together. Will custom races let you get that classic feel? Or will things constantly keep on remixing?
But what if you love those point-to-point races and just want them to be even bigger and more challenging? Knockout Tour is one long cross-country race, with checkpoints to blaze a trail towards and the final four drivers to reach that point being eliminated. From twenty-four racers at the start, it will chop the field down to just four by the time you’re racing for the win. It ramps up the pressure in a very different way, and the sheer number of players, the volume of pickups going off makes for some seriously topsy-turvy moments as you tumble from 5th to 19th and the cusp of getting completely knocked out as you come to the next time gate.
It’s a lot of fun, though, and shows that there’s wide open avenues for Nintendo still to explore with their biggest game franchise. There’s also no doubt tons about this game that is still yet to be revealed, with a Nintendo Direct dedicated to Mario Kart World coming on 17th April.