Mario Kart World Lives Up To Its Legacy, But Not Its Title

It’s been eleven years since Mario Kart 8 put the finishing touches on the perfect arcade racing game. It was a game so good, Nintendo chose to forgo a sequel for its next console and instead built on Mario Kart 8’s sound foundation for an unprecedented five years. Two console generations, 96 tracks, and eight additional characters later, it’s hard to imagine how Nintendo could improve on the definitive game in this long-running series.

Nintendo’s answer to that unenviable conundrum has finally arrived alongside its new console. There are a lot of parallels between Mario Kart World and the Switch 2. Both aren’t straying far from what came before, but they are much more ambitious. In some ways, those ambitions fall flat considering Nintendo’s track record of big, innovative swings. But keeping what works with a few bells and whistles that keep things fresh ultimately makes for a product most players will be happy with.

Mario Kart World is yet another fun entry in the Mario Kart franchise. It has a hard time improving what came before it in any sort of meaningful way. But it has enough new ideas that work to make this an easy recommendation for a Switch 2 owner.

Drive And In Living Color

Mario Kart World is the ninth game in the beloved racing series, and the premiere game in the Switch 2’s launch lineup. Within five minutes of playing it, it's clear how important this game is to Nintendo, as it looks and sounds like the biggest game Nintendo’s ever made.

There’s a bombastic energy to Mario Kart World that feels like its developer is ushering in a new era of production value. The bluesy harmonicas and saxophones, funky basslines, and simple drum patterns are the throughlines for the game’s soundtrack. Layering this jazzy vibe onto Mario Kart’s traditional orchestral fare is a match made in heaven that perfectly drives home the game’s theme of roadside wanderlust. Mario Kart World sounds like a cross-country trip with familiar friends in all the right ways.

The game is no slouch visually either. As a showcase for the Switch 2, Mario Kart World meets the occasion. It’s hard to spot how it improves on the visuals of Mario Kart 8 when in the thick of a race, but cruising around the game’s open world as it cycles between night and day allowed me to slow down and better appreciate how technically impressive Mario Kart World is. From varied landscapes that pop with color to some of the most gorgeous in-game sunsets I’ve ever seen, Mario Kart World is playable proof of how big an improvement the Switch 2 is over its predecessor.

Greener Pastures, But For What?

The open world is the centerpiece of what’s new about Mario Kart World and it is full of stunning sights. All 32 tracks of its tracks are part of an interconnected open world that players can explore in the new Free Roam mode. This is a pretty logical way to escalate the series after Mario Kart 8 — a proven strategy that has worked for other popular racing franchises like Burnout, Need For Speed, and Forza. Unfortunately, how Mario Kart World integrates this open world into its core gameplay is flat-out disappointing.

For one, there isn’t a whole lot to do when driving around the world of Mario Kart. When the novelty of seeing how the game’s tracks are interconnected wears off, what’s left is a pretty lifeless world. Pedestrian cars don’t do anything interesting. You’ll occasionally see other cart racers but there’s no way to interact with them. Outfit changes make for a pretty lackluster collectible, as are the coins and Peach Medallions used to unlock vehicles. Even the cute easter eggs like hopping into a UFO or an 18-wheeler get old quickly.

The mode’s primary goal is to complete little bite-sized challenges called P-Switches. Driving over these signposted spots activates an objective the player must complete in a set amount of time. There are nearly 400 P-Switches, lending hours of gameplay to the game’s single-player component.

“How Mario Kart World integrates this open world into its core gameplay is flat-out disappointing.”

While these challenges can be fun, they become repetitive after a while as you’re essentially completing the same objects (collect the coins, race through rings, avoid obstacles) over and over again across land, sea, and air. The majority of them can also be completed in under 20 seconds, but they lack a quick restart option that doesn’t require you to sit through an unskippable cutscene introducing you to the objective at hand. P-Switches everyone in a while, a P-Switch will throw a wrench in the formula, but few of them got my heart rate up in the same way actual races do.

P-Switches work best as an extended tutorial for Mario Kart World’s new mechanics. The charge jump, which lets players hop over obstacles and land with a speed boost, is the newest gameplay wrinkle added to Mario Kart’s signature drift and boost mechanic. It’s also how players initiate the new wall ride, which lets players drive on vertical surfaces and the rail grind. These are not simple maneuvers to pull off. It's easy to forfeit a race trying to do something super technical only to end up failing miserably as others pass you by. So the ability to practice these new mechanics via P-Switch missions lends some indispensable value to Free Roam in the early going.

Overall though, the substance of Mario Kart’s open-world doesn’t hold a candle to the dozens of other racing games that use this exact formula. The fact that you can’t go from exploring this exciting world to grand prix seamlessly without going to the main menu is inexcusable when Burnout Paradise was doing this in 2008. And the result is an underwhelming new edition that feels strangely siloed from the rest of the game, and from what’s considered standard in the modern landscape of the racing genre.

Solid Ground Game

Luckily Mario Kart World brings back all the traditional modes and they’re as fun as ever. The traditional four-race Grand Prix Cups return, punctuating the excellence of the new tracks. Battle Mode has some really fun arenas that represent some of the best in the series in my opinion.

The real main event of Mario Kart World is Knockout Tour. This new Battle Royale-style mode has players racing in one continuous 10-to15-minute sprint across several tracks. After each checkpoint in the endurance race, the bottom four racers are eliminated. This happens five times the final four are competing for first place.

This mode is exhilarating. Knockout Tour is so good, that I’d argue it should have been the game’s namesake instead of its lackluster open world. It’s the best use of the game’s interconnected tracks by far, and quickly became the mode my partner and I gravitated toward when playing split screen.

“Knockout Tour is so good, that I’d argue it should have been the game’s namesake.”

While I prefer the twisting turns of Mario Kart 8’s looping track design, Mario Kart World’s focus on sprints makes for the new meta. Drifting and boosting are still very important to racing. But with fewer big turns on average, there’s an increased emphasis on drafting, the charge jump, and the other new tricks. It makes the moment-to-moment action just different enough from Mario Kart 8 to warrant a new skill ceiling.

That said, the new trick system seems limitless this early in the game’s life. Players have already begun sharing some incredible shortcuts they’ve invented using the wall ride and charge jump, and all of these are just scratching the surface of what high-level play will look like.

Playing Mario Kart online has always been a frustrating combination of chance and skill. In six months, I predict competitive Mario Kart World will be impenetrable for those not willing to master all the ways these new abilities can be exploited across the game’s 30-plus maps. While this will be deeply compelling for players wanting to squeeze the most out of this evergreen game, it spells doom for folks who will want to play against randoms on a casual level over the internet.

Clenching Victory

Mario Kart World isn’t the perfect sequel. But it's a sensible one. Its main bullet-pointed feature falls short of its promising potential. But the rest of the package is so rock solid that it’s hard to fault this glaring misstep as more than an experiment that doesn’t quite work.

The follow-up to Mario Kart 8 was always going to have a tough time trying to fill its predecessor's shoes. But Mario Kart World does just enough to establish itself as its own distinct and still fun entry in the series. From its joyous presentation to the new depth of its accessible racing, Mario Kart World succeeds in living up to the Mario Kart name despite remaining firmly in the shadow of what came before it.