I feel like I’m about to say something unforgivable. I played a couple of hours of Mario Kart World recently, including a good amount of time with its new features like Knockout Tour and the open world, and came away having only had, well, quite a nice time. There were moments of hilarity – mostly involving gurning at my peers with the Switch 2‘s new camera while mercilessly blue-shelling them – and moments of typical kart-racer tension. But also, a little surprisingly, moments when I felt I’d maybe rather be playing something else (the strangely alluring Welcome Tour perhaps being one option).
It’s still Mario Kart, of course, and so ultimately when you’re doing Mario Kart things – racing friends, the CPU, randoms online – you will still have a great deal of fun. More or less exactly the same amount of fun in fact as you did with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, I’d hazard a guess, as not an enormous amount has changed beside the addition of wall driving and grind rails – more on that shortly – but this really isn’t a bad thing. Deluxe rightly goes down as one of the very best kart racers ever and, as Tom Phillips mentioned in his earlier preview of Mario Kart World, it makes perfect sense to avoid diverting too much from such a magic formula. It’s only when you’re not doing Mario Kart things – namely, not actually doing any racing – that things get a little wobbly.
In fact, Mario Kart World’s best moments are those that don’t change at all, so much as just slightly enhance it. Couch co-op, with the aforementioned camera in particular, is a joy. Much has understandably been made of this camera and the mystical C-button’s positioning as a kind of punt for the Gen Zs and Alphas of this world, but – not to get too deep – in practice it’s more a reflection of how interaction has simply changed between humans overall, particularly after Covid-19 and the accompanying shifts in social media. A lot of media simply has another person’s face – or your own! – pasted over the corner of it these days. In Mario Kart that’s somehow weirdly great.
A live camera feed of your face – all four of your faces, picked up by the one camera, if you’re playing splitscreen – is pinned onto your avatar on scoreboards, in pre-match montages, or hovering just above the back of your kart as you race by. It sounds simple and it is, but then all little strokes of genius kind of are. I find it hard to think of a time I’ve laughed harder in video games recently than when pulling faces at colleagues while haring past them through absolutely no skill of my own, stewing at my place on the leaderboard, or simply zooming in obnoxiously close when setting up the camera itself. Cue lots of crossed eyes, attempts at live recreations of the Luigi death stare, and instant come-uppances for overdoing it. Again, it’s a tiny change, but what better thing to do with a near-immaculately balanced entity like Mario Kart than to simply add an extra space for expression on top?
That question’s maybe made a little less rhetorical by the other attempts to freshen things up that Nintendo’s made here, which – in admittedly still a very brief sampling of just a couple of hours – so far left me feeling a little mixed. On the better end is Knockout Tour, which again as we’ve already mentioned is delightfully tense, and a fine way of unconventionally melding genres with the once-viral battle royale. It’s also a wonderful way to show you more of Mario Kart World’s smartly webbed-together tracks, and an equally wonderful way to make races feel grander, longer, more climactic and involved. The only downside of course being that with higher highs come lower lows – it feels absolutely rubbish to get knocked out early. Expect tantrums, if you’re playing this with kids (or are yet to fully grow out of being one), as failing to reach the required position at the next checkpoint means either pootling about the open world while you wait for the lengthy, six-part race to conclude, or simply sitting there watching other people race until they’re done.
The racing itself meanwhile has had some mechanical tweaks – or rather, additions; an added spoiler on the back, say, as opposed to proper changes under the bonnet. Items have been tweaked and new ones added, too, like the ability to throw three waves of multiple hammers, a la Hammer Bro, which work well as a short-range crowd disruptor. The blue shell meanwhile now has an area-of-effect explosion, for instance, which is an interesting twist. I never actually saw this connect with other racers in action but, theoretically, that seems to mean it could hit nearby players in second or third, as well as the current front-runner, potentially balancing out the perceived downside of moving into top spot.
Races themselves, especially the massive 24-player ones that I expect to be wildly popular, also feel incredibly busy and tightly packed. On one occasion a single player broke free of the main pack and got way out ahead, but on all of the others the entire group of 24 was essentially clustered in one vast, incredibly chaotic peloton. It’s not uncommon to find yourself flying up from 20th to 5th and back down again (and probably back up and down a few more times soon after that). The “all items; all hazards on” Super Smash Bros. player inside me took great pleasure in the carnage, but more intensely competitive players – you all know one – might have a few complaints about it being a bit much. (I’ve found they really love it if you follow that up with a suggestion they simply try harder.)
The biggest addition to actual moment-to-moment racing, meanwhile, is the wall driving and rail grinding. Holding down the drift button – crucially without adding any directional input – will begin to charge up a kind of extra high hop. Doing that by a grindable rail, or any vertical wall at all, will let you hop up onto it, potentially unlocking new side paths and shortcuts, or simply just looking quite cool.
In the context of playing for the first time and in just an afternoon, it was hard to really pick out too many major advantages of this – modern Mario Kart’s higher fidelity and thus detail generally makes it harder to pick out clear, navigable side routes amongst the visual noise as it is – but my suspicion is that there will be subtleties to the moments where you want to employ it at specific parts of specific tracks, as well as the actual proper shortcuts it makes possible.
The act of using it, however, was pretty frustrating, mostly because of how it’s mapped on the controller. More often than not I found myself accidentally drifting when I meant to start charging up a hop or, just as often, I charged it but not early enough, and so simply drove straight into the wall or rail I was trying to hop up onto. Adding it to the drift button, and stipulating that you can’t add a directional input at the same time, is just a weird thing in practice – it means any rails or walls near corners were basically out of the question, as timing the quite lengthy charge-up as well as not turning while activating it was just one too many things to think about. The reason for this of course is clear enough: while it’s odd to put it on the same shoulder button when using the Switch 2 handheld or controller mode, where it has two on each side, it needs to double up for when you’re playing with just a single Joy-Con. I’m also hopeful that with time it becomes muscle memory, just as the muscle memory of drifting with that same button has become so ingrained that it’s tricky to unlearn.
Really, that’s just a little quibble for now then. But there is one more significant concern I have about Mario Kart World, in the open world itself. It’s hard to know exactly how deep a look I got at it with the time I had, but if what I saw was everything – and a Nintendo representative, while remaining appropriately coy, did seem to intimate to me that it was – then I have to say, it was really quite dull.
The good part is really the feat of assembling it itself, which I’ve no doubt took an extraordinary amount of work: dozens of tracks all connect into one vast knot of courses and their connective tissue, something which feels almost impossible to think about given the range and verticality of a Mario Kart course over, say, the tracks of a Forza Horizon. But when you actually imagine what it’s like to drive around a load of Mario Kart tracks – and the accompanying fields, valleys, rivers and the like that dot the sidelines of them – without an actual race going on, you might see where I’m coming from here. The worry is it is just a little pointless.
Nintendo’s promise is that there are plenty of secrets to uncover with enough diligence, and that their typical playfulness and invention will make the slightly aimless drifting around more worthwhile. In a good bit of time investigating though, I didn’t find any of real note. There are little platforming sections for collectibles such as Peach Coins, which require a lot of skill at times and are heavily evocative of the old 3D platformer days. And there are special vehicles, like lorries or hovercraft, which very occasionally spawn in the world and can be driven into the back of, temporarily granting you control of them. But then you drive your big lorry about for 20 seconds or so, plough through a few NPC cars, and spawn back out of it again and, well, that’s kind of that.
Other activities are mostly doled out as part of P-Switch challenges. Drive over a blue P-Switch and a little activity will spawn, such as driving through several checkpoints while avoiding hazards against a tight time limit, but again these are frightfully brief and ultimately a little repetitive. After doing a handful I didn’t feel a great urge to do any more. What else? There are warp pipes, though they seem to just help you navigate the world via mini shortcuts rather than take you anywhere special (yet – this is Mario after all! I would be foolish to rule out a surprise). And crucially there are also question mark pads which you can drive over. Doing so displayed a statement to the effect of “you have driven over a question mark pad”, which piqued my interest with its bluntness – surely something interesting is happening here, but I couldn’t figure out what.
And that, ultimately, will be the real crux of it. Has Nintendo got a few secrets up its sleeve, or down its pipe? On the surface, the big headline feature of Mario Kart World is, at least in just one still brief first encounter, a little underwhelming. But now at least we have one, essential question to go in search of answers to once the Switch 2 properly arrives. Since when does any proper Mario game reveal all its secrets up front?
