There’s Something Off About Mario Kart World’s Biggest Feature
Mario Kart World’s more noteworthy innovation feels surprisingly tame.
After playing Mario Kart World for over five hours, it’s clear that all the classic elements that make the arcade racing series great are present. Tense, chaotic moment-to-moment action. Wacky items that can sway the balance of a relay at the drop of a hat. A solid handling system. Even the mechanics that require mastery like drifting are present, with some new ideas like the charge jump layering some new depth to the way players navigate the track.
But there’s one part of this new entry I wasn’t quite convinced of by the end of my session: Mario Kart World’s big, interconnected continent. While I had high hopes that Nintendo would do for the Forza Horizon formula what Breath Of The Wild did for open-world adventure games, I came away feeling more underwhelmed than I anticipated.
If you’re not aware, Mario Kart World’s top-line feature is that all of the game’s tracks exist in a giant open world that players can explore at their own pace. It’s a pretty big departure from the traditional Mario Kart format which had players race through isolated tracks one by one. It’s a strange but welcome change for the series. After Mario Kart 8 essentially perfected the series, the next entry had to swing big to set itself apart. Going open-world is a pretty logical way to shake things up going into the new Nintendo generation.
Racing is still as fun as it’s ever been, with some new mechanics to master as well.
This shake-up isn’t doing anything particularly new. Burnout Paradise popularized the open-world racing game, a baton that plenty of others like Midnight Club, Need For Speed, and the aforementioned Forza Horizon series have run with. Each of these games brings a special brand of fun to a crowded genre, and the very idea that Mario Kart adding its own spin is scintillating in theory.
But once I really had a chance to let loose in Mario Kart World, I was surprised by just how isolated this feature felt from the game we know and love.
As detailed during last month’s Mario Kart World Direct, the open world is filled with P-Switches that activate challenges unique to the part of the world you’re in. There are hundreds of these to try out, each offering a bite-sized challenge to master. It’s a pretty intuitive way to get players to master old and new mechanics. One P-Switch had me getting acquainted with the new wall-ride abilities. Another had me precariously grinding electric power lines alongside a moving train. Each of these varied in difficulty and nearly all of them took less than 30 seconds to beat once I wrapped my head around the actual challenge (something that will probably change in other, more difficult parts of the world).
However, aside from the P-Switches, I struggled to really settle into the open world. I often hit long stretches of road without much to see or do outside the occasional outfit change. When I did see other racers, there were few ways to interact with them. Out of the dozen or times I saw another racer, the game challenged me to pursue them and hit them with green shells just once. It was the sort of spontaneous challenges I expected more of, and without them, there wasn’t a whole lot to break the monotony of cruising around looking for P-Switches and coin stacks.
Outside of the Grand Prix mode, I found there was a lot of downtime hitting the roads outside the Mushroom Kingdom.
In this more casual context, even the simple act of cruising around wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I hoped. When free roaming in a dune buggy or Lamborghini in Forza, the rumble and kinetic energy of pushing this virtual representation of a real-life machine is thrilling in and of itself. It makes getting to the next point of interest or objective fun. None of the vehicles I drove in Mario Kart World had that sensory feedback.
The strangest thing of all is how separate the free-roam experience felt from the rest of the game. While other open-world racing games let players go from racing in a grand prix to the open world to side objectives seamlessly, that’s not the case here. When it’s time to compete, players have to go to the main menu and select a Grand Prix cup like older games in the series. Ultimately, this doesn’t make actual races less fun. But having to back out into the main menu to go from free roam to grand prix feels archaic when other games have gelled all of their parts together more cohesively as long as 17 years ago.
As a lifelong Mario Kart fan, I would love to be proven wrong. Maybe the reason why free roam and more traditional Mario Kart modes are separated will make more sense once I put more time into the game. Maybe driving around will feel better once I unlock the right vehicles and other parts of the world will introduce me to more interesting emergent challenges. But my first impressions left me a little less excited about the game’s newest feature.
The rest of what I played was very fun. There’s no getting around that Mario Kart World is the game most players should pick up with their Nintendo Switch 2. Jumping into multiplayer with friends was as fun as ever, especially in the new battle royale-like Knockout Mode. And during the moments when the game commits to what the series has been doing well since the early ‘90s, my concerns with the open world were the last thing on my mind.
Mario Kart World still has all the charm of older entries, and I suspect most players hold it in as high regard as the stellar last game. But while this marks a big change for Mario Kart as a series, it doesn’t do much to innovate or move the needle on the crowded open-world racing genre. And for a game as big as this, that feels uncharacteristic for the legendary developer behind the must-have launch title.
