How do you follow up a nigh on perfect video game? It’s a problem that Nintendo has faced more often than most, yet with each generation they release a game that brings new perspectives and twists while also refining the core ideas further. Mario Kart 8 in particular was the culmination of this iconic series first two decades. Sure, everyone might have their favourite that they grew up with or spent years playing in split-screen with siblings and friend, but Mario Kart 8 game refined and honed everything so, so brilliantly.
Mario Kart World had to take a completely different approach for Nintendo Switch 2, providing some brilliant and hugely fun new twists to the series. There’s the big open world that you can free roam around, and which provides the basis for all the races, there’s the 24-player races, and the Knockout Tour. It’s bigger, it’s bolder… and it’s also more inconsistent.
From the off, the kart racing feels immediate and familiar in all the right ways. You boost start the same way, you drift the same, slipstream the same, still hold up to two items — so many of the core elements are instantly recognisable — but there have also been a lot of nips, tucks and tweaks along the way.
In general the driving is now much more expressive, the tilt and suspension travel as you drift through corners more cartoony, but also subtly more informative for what your kart is doing. This goes hand-in-hand with the renewed character designs and animations.
You will see your character’s jump boost animations a lot in Mario Kart World, whether it’s flying off a regular ramp, bouncing across waves on the open sea with the newly transforming vehicles, grinding along rails or wall-riding, you’re constantly tapping the shoulder button for mini-boosts. The latter two additions are nice to have, but difficult to master and feel fairly inessential compared to simply nailing your drifts. Getting onto a rail can be more difficult than it’s worth, as you either have to hit the start of the rail where it meets the ground or charge up a jump to hop on. This uses the same shoulder button as drifting, and will just start drifting if you put any steering in. It flummoxes muscle memory and makes going for a grind rail feel too risky.
Mario Kart World is a lot more forgiving when you get hit by items. You now keep some momentum when tumbling after getting hit by a shell, a Bullet Bill rampaging through will tilt people out of the way instead of spinning them out, and the lightning strike doesn’t keep you tiny for quite so long. That does make items that steal movement all the more punishing, most notably the Mega Mushroom squashing people flat.
A big reason for this general shift in the items is the boosted race size, which leaps from 12 to a whopping 24-players. Doubling the number of players means double the number of items being grabbed and fired off, leading to significantly more chaotic races. It’s still possible for the leading player to make a break for it while everyone behind descends into anarchy fighting over second, but wherever you are, it’s devastatingly easy to tumble from the leading positions to the back half of the field after getting hit by multiple items in quick succession. This can be brutal in the last few seconds of the race or just before a checkpoint.
That said, you can just as easily rampage up the leaderboard, with the game still favouring those toward the back with Bullet Bills, Mega Mushrooms and (perhaps most commonly) Golden Mushrooms.
While you feel all of these changes in the regular races and Grand Prix, it really comes together in Knockout Tour, the huge elimination mode that races all the way across the world map, knocking the last four racers out at each checkpoint until just four remain to race for victory. It’s a great mode, and my go-to for online play, but it is the embodiment of this even more chaotic style of Mario Kart racing. Knockout Tour is what all of this feels like it was designed for, and it has a knock on effect through the rest of the game as well.
Grand Prix is still a sequence of four races, but after zipping around the first track for three laps, all the subsequent races start with a drive through the open world to the next track, and then finish with generally one lap of that circuit. It dilutes the traditional Mario Kart experience, making Grand Prix into a training ground for Knockout Tour, replacing more bespoke race tracks with the arguably less exciting open world.
The open world is still great, in its own way. Nintendo and their partners have put in a lot of effort to fill it with different biomes, and stuffing it with nods and winks to everything Mario. When exploring in Free Roam, you’ll find collectables and P-Switch challenges to test both your exploration and driving skills, yet it cannot escape the curse that every open world has a boring areas you have to pass through to get to the next landmark. The jump to 24-players mean that roads must be wider and have huge banks of unmissable item boxes, and where bespoke circuits can do interesting loops and twists, there’s so many stretches in the open world sections that are just long straights or mild curves. No amount of Nintendo magic will make a highway not a highway.
One fix for this is would be to have a classic Grand Prix mode alongside the new. You can still do a pure 3-lap race of any track in Vs. mode, alongside point-to-point race combos that aren’t featured in the other modes, but the go-to for players will be Grand Prix, Knockout Tour.
The inherent messiness of this new direction is also found in the character list. The main cast are all here, looking better than ever, and have a bunch of costumes to unlock, but its like Nintendo took the franchise and shook it until everyone fell out. The field is littered with every creature and enemy that Mario has ever met, and they’re not given anywhere near the same amount of love. DK only has a single costume to find, and as beloved as Cow has become, she doesn’t even have a cute hat to find. And then there’s all the nonsensical inclusions of Sidestepper, Swoop the bat, Dolphin, Fish Bone and more. They’re funny, but they rarely make sense when sat on a bike and you can see that Fish Bone just sort of floats over the seat.
Mario Kart World is particularly good online. There’s Race, Knockout Tour and Battle, but you can also create a custom lobby for your friends to join and just share the world in Free Roam. It’s nice, and combines well with the Switch 2’s new GameChat feature, allowing you to play socially without jumping through hoops to talk to your friends. If you have a camera, then the game can also track your face and insert it as a marker for you in races, highlighting where your friends/enemies are for when you fancy whacking them with a shell.
But where partying up in Free Roam is easy, it’s annoying that you can’t jump directly into other modes with your lobby of friends. You can join your friends, but only when they’re already in a matchmaking lobby, and when lobbies fill up within seconds it adds a lot of faff where you then wait for the end of a race and then try to join up. Please make this easier in a patch, Nintendo.
And of course, there’s local split-screen, which works as well as you’d hope. Yes it will drop the frame rate to accommodate four players, but it’s still a lot of fun, and if you have a camera, that can add four player highlights to add to the shenanigans.