After what felt like an absolute eternity, the next generation of Nintendo has finally arrived in the form of the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s no surprise that with over 68 million units sold on the Nintendo Switch and 11 years to prepare, the Switch 2 launched with the next iteration of Mario Kart. Many of us wondered for a long time when we’d finally see Mario Kart 9. Well, the wait is over because it’s time to go on a cross-country trip through The Mushroom Kingdom in Mario Kart World.
As someone who has put in time into nearly every single Mario Kart in franchise history and as a day 1 adopter of Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U who then became a day 1 adopter of MK8 Deluxe, I came with high expectations. It was important to me that I be able to judge MK World on its own merits while also understanding that, despite not using “9” in the title, it carries the responsibility of being a worthy next-gen title for the franchise.
Mario Kart 8 left some huge shoes to fill. The difference in gameplay and quality from Mario Kart Wii or MK7 (3DS) to MK8 is staggering. I knew that expecting such a leap again would be asking too much because even Nintendo has described Mario Kart 8 as a perfected version of the formula they’ve been using for over 3 decades.
What’s New?
So let’s talk first about some new things that Nintendo did with Mario Kart World. The world map connecting all 32 courses is genius. The ability to go into free roam mode and just explore would be value added enough, but then to find mini games and other unlockables inside the vast world Nintendo created is a big bonus.
My 22-year-old came in last night to play with me and hadn’t seen much outside of a few promotional things online. He thought that the free roam still limited you to the parts of the track that Lakitu would approve of us being on, and was shocked to see me drive off the beaten path and hit a P switch to trigger a minigame. This was a brilliant move by Nintendo to allow players to go anywhere on the map. To connect all these tracks but limit drivers to only seeing the world around them from the road would have been a major letdown, but Nintendo understood that people would want to look in every nook and cranny, and they responded accordingly.
Unfortunately, free roam isn’t perfect. There is a mini 3D map on the bottom right corner, which is cool, but there is no compass to tell me what direction I’m driving in, and I have to exit free roam to look at the full map. What’s cool is that I can click on any part of the map and immediately start free roam there, but I’d love to go on a road trip all over the world map without having to leave free roam just to be able to see where I am. Hopefully, this can be addressed with a future update.
While Grand Prix and battle modes were left largely unaffected by all the changes made by Nintendo, Mario Kart World did get an upgrade for the VS mode. It was already possible to customize a VS cup to include items or not, COMs or not, and even set the number of tracks as high as 32 races. Now, those races can include intermission style races where, instead of players doing three laps on a track, the race starts in one place and concludes after a lap in a new place. For instance, I could start at Toad’s Factory, but end the race at Dry Bones Burnout. While MK World boasts an impressive 32 tracks already, this gives it the feeling that there’s even more.
In the same vein as VS mode, allowing players to drive through the map, my favorite new addition to Mario Kart World has got to be Knockout Tour. Drivers on the Knockout Tour will go through the space of 4 courses with 6 checkpoints along the way. Each checkpoint has a required placement to move on to the next checkpoint. The first checkpoint requires you to place in the top 20. If you make it, you’ll go to the next checkpoint, which requires you to place in the top 16, then 12, then 8, and 4. If you are in the top 4 on the last checkpoint, you’ll finish the rac,e but if at any time you don’t meet the checkpoint’s threshold, you’ll get knocked out.
Knockout Tour is one long, continuous race, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. While a Grand Prix or VS cup allows players to get to first place by adding all points from all races together to see who did best overall, in a Knockout Tour, it doesn’t matter how you start; it only matters how you finish. More than once, I spent the vast majority of a Knockout Tour in first place only to be knocked into second place at the very last minute of the race.
I consider myself to be a pretty decent Mario Kart player, but going to the online mode was a humbling experience. I am a scrub compared to the legions of players online that make me look like I haven’t been playing since the 90s. There’s really nothing new happening in online vs mode. It’s simply your standard: pick your player, vote on a track, and race until you drop out.
What is new is that instead of seeing everyone’s Mii drivers waiting for a new race to start, you get dropped into the free roam to give you something to do while you wait. Also, Knockout Tour was added to online mode which is the definitive experience for that mode. It sounds weird to say, but I don’t get knocked out enough in single player but I have to really fight to stay in it when I’m online.
Sadly, Mario Kart World is missing one of the best ways to play, which was introduced to us in MK8 - 200cc. The high-speed chaos of 200cc was my favorite speed to play in Mario Kart 8 because it was so unpredictable. Unlocking Gold Mario was crazy difficult because a lot of what happens in 200cc is out of my control. Not having 200cc in MK World is a huge letdown, but hopefully it’ll make its way there eventually.
Game progression is vastly improved from any of its predecessors. What I mean is that if you want gold at all speeds of a cup but don’t feel like doing it in 50cc, 100cc, and 150cc, fear not. It is now possible to cut some of it out. If you place gold in 150cc, you’ll be automatically granted gold in 50cc and 100cc. Likewise, if you get gold in 100cc but only get silver in 150, you’ll show gold in the highest place gold was achieved and lower with the silver everywhere else. The stars progress like that too.
If you got 3 star Gold on 100cc and 2 star Gold on 150cc, you’ll see gold on all three cups but will only see 3 stars on 50cc and 100cc with 150cc showing 2. When I realized I didn’t have to play every single cup speed for the sake of winning gold everywhere, I immediately went straight to 150cc and haven’t looked back.
New And Sometimes Improved Items
There are a few new items in Mario Kart World that for me have had varying levels of success. I’m going to add the hammer although technically it appeared in the little known game Mario Kart Arcade GP for the Triforce Arcade console. It allows you to throw hammers in an arch like the Hammer Bros do and the hammers get stuck in the ground causing a driving hazard for other players. It's a cool concept but the execution is less than ideal. Throwing the hammers in front of you causes the driving hazard to be there for you too. That would be ok to me except that unlike a banana peel, the hammers only stay on the ground for a few moments - just enough time to have to avoid them yourself.
The golden coin shell acts similar to the blue shell in that it will hit anyone it passes by without it breaking. What sets it apart from the blue shell aside from the lack of a boom when it gets to first place is that it leaves a trail of coins wherever it goes. If it hits someone, it leaves a small pile of coins. It’s a really great way to get coins because drivers in the middle of the pack are so much more likely to have a hard time improving their speed because the first few drivers are taking the coins.
Kamek has an orb that you can find in MK World that transforms other players into a different character momentarily. If you’re in Moo Moo Meadows, you may find yourself turned into the Cow for a small stretch of the course. It’s a fun item, and getting transformed into NPC villains like Spike unlocks them as playable characters. The problem is that if I were to use Kamek’s orb, it transforms everyone around me - but not me. Because Kamek is used to unlock characters, I still have two characters that I can’t get unlocked because I have to drive in just the right place and someone else has to get the orb. Also, it only appears if you’re in the middle of the pack but it has no real weaponization to help you improve your standings in the race. Items are too valuable a commodity to be wasting on playing dress-up.
Lastly, the dash food is how players can unlock character outfits in Mario Kart World. They are found on the track separate from regular item boxes and can be ignored if you don’t want them. They also provide a mushroom-like boost so they have a function even if you don’t have any costumes left to unlock. Even cooler is that they appear on the map even if you’re not in a race. I spent a couple days just playing in free roam to go looking for and unlocking costumes with dash food. They were a nice addition to the game and could be used to unlock future content.
Choose Your Character!
The character list for Mario Kart World is big. There are 50 characters, and many of the characters have variant costumes that can also be unlocked. The problem is that, for me, most of the new characters that come from Super Mario’s storied history just don’t matter to me. I would much rather have the Koopalings and Kamek back than have the ability to play as a cow, a snowman, or a dolphin. Goomba and Piranha Plant were cool additions but so many of the new characters were either new or I just didn’t care about them. I’m not saying they don’t add value. I know there are people who probably love playing as a bat, but I’d much rather see them expand the roster rather than replacing characters.
The costumes were a really cool addition, and I love picking out a costume and then changing clothes with dash food in the middle of a race. I just don’t like how inconsistent it is. In Mario Kart 8, if I picked a character with variant skins like Yoshi or Shy Guy, it would open a smaller menu to select the version of the character I wanted to play as. In MK World, Mario has 10 options: his original clothes plus 9 outfit changes. I have yet to find a good reason why Nintendo is forcing me to scroll through 10 Mario icons in the character select screen, then another 9 for Luigi, etc.
Also, some characters are getting way fewer costumes than others. Pauline and Donkey Kong each get only one variant costume. When I saw that the characters had costume changes, I expected to get that cool fire-flower Donkey Kong look from The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I’ll admit this last one is a bit personal, but my favorite character in Mario is Dry Bones. He’s been playable in multiple games, including past iterations of Mario Kart.
When my wife and I were first married, we hosted game nights regularly that featured Mario Party games and I was so good at the mini games that it became a running joke that people were coming over to get beat down by Dry Bones. It’s been disappointing to not see Dry Bones in recent Mario Party games but it felt downright disrespectful to not see him get any costume changes and he seems to be relegated to the NPC/bad guys list of drivers instead of being an “actual character.”
I was also disappointed to see that we lost all our Nintendo friends like the Inklings, Link, and the Animal Crossing villagers. I know it’s “Mario” Kart but I would have loved having Hyrule be a track to go explore in free roam. I’m starting to sound like a broken record but hopefully these things can change in a future update or DLC.
I expect that kart selection will be a polarizing topic. If you really loved the high level of customization that kart selection had in Mario Kart 8, you may be disappointed to find out that the karts are much more streamlined in Mario Kart World. To me, it makes a lot of sense. In MK8, there were several weight classes ranging from very light to very heavy and each weight class interacted with different kart components in their own way. I was always overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things to consider when building a kart/driver combo. Mario Kart World by contrast is much easier on me. There seem to be, though I can’t fully confirm this, only three weight classes and they matter way less to the overall experience than they did in MK8. Yes, heavy drivers interact with the karts differently than lightweight drivers but at the end of the day, it really just comes down to how you want to prioritize your stats.
If you need a kart that handles well, you can find one in any weight class. The same is true if you prioritize speed, acceleration, or kart weight. The wheels are standard to the kart, the glider has been replaced with already attached wings and my brain thanks Nintendo for not making me re-learn a thousand new kart parts just to be able to find the combo that works for me. I’m able to play with a much broader selection of characters and karts because I don’t need a dozen spreadsheets to do so.
Unfortunately, kart selection suffers from the same kind of inconvenient UI that the character selection suffers from, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to sort the karts to a more practical outline based on body type or stats. It’s incredibly disappointing to have had such a good UI for characters and karts in MK 8 only to downgrade to something far less useful in what could have at least been a lateral move if not a better UI.
Conclusion
As far as Mario Kart successors go, MK World is going to be right up there with the greats like MK8 Deluxe. Innovative new experiences like free roam and Knockout Tour set this apart from the last 30+ years of kart racing in the Mushroom Kingdom. The problem is that for every good thing Nintendo did with MK World, they did something so bone-headed that I’m starting to get grooves in my scalp from all the head scratching that I’ve done in the last week.
Don’t get me wrong, with 25 hours into Mario Kart World already, my interest is not waning. I want to play more and more. I want to get better at it. I want to see my name at the top of a leaderboard online. I think Nintendo has a hit on their hands if they just fix a few issues with quality of life. Also, I wouldn’t say no to them fixing things that maybe only I think are broken, like Dry Bones not having costumes. I just wish they hadn’t tried to fix things that weren’t broken. Some quality of life improvements could make Mario Kart World a near-perfect game.
If you liked Mario Kart 8, you’re likely to like Mario Kart World, and I can enthusiastically encourage you to try it if you’re on the fence. There are many kart racers on the market toda,y but there is a good reason why only Mario Kart has stood the test of time for over 30 years.
