Mario Kart World is new and messy. That's okay and, ultimately, it's necessary

Nobody wants to have to follow up perfection, and Mario Kart 8 nailed it. Ten years and two consoles ago, the game refined the arcade kart racer into the very best version of itself. Rather than bothering with a sequel, Nintendo simply kept adding content to it until it was not just the most beautiful toy box but also the biggest, un-touchably large. On the Switch, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe never stopped selling new copies.

But once a popular game series refines itself so thoroughly, it can’t just stop forever; not so long as technology continues to march forward and an infinitely thirsty audience waves their wallets demanding more. Nor can it keep reiterating as Mario Kart 8 did: the game reached a peak. Mario Kart World is tasked with reinventing the beloved standard, and when you make something new, it’s got to be refined all over again until it’s perfect. And so it is with Mario Kart World.

This game is exceptional, but it’s also doing a lot of new things, and as such it’s inevitably flawed. World can’t just pop into being fully formed, at 8’s level of refinement: that took years of reiteration across many different games. And as any arcade game nerd will tell you, the first revision is always a little bit wonky.

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They went for size

Mario Kart World’s approach to improving on the previous game is simply “make it bigger”. The implications of that mission statement to leak into every aspect of the game, for better and for worse.

The theme of World is taking a big road trip, and as such the main hook of the game is the full unification of all the race courses into a larger, inter-connected “world” map: a system of highways connects Peach’s castle to the little city below, to Donkey Kong’s spaceport and the course on the seafront nearby. And there is an open-world mode where you can freely traverse this massive expanse at your leisure, with no pressure to complete the various mission goals or collect the various collectibles strewn about the place. It’s a very chill joyride with a fuzzy car radio quietly pumping out ska remixes from old Mario games. (The game’s mind-blowing soundtrack is worth the price of purchase by itself.) But despite the marketing, that’s not really the main mode of the game, so I’m going to skip around it for right now.

Racing

The standard arcade race is at the core of this experience, and Nintendo can’t change too much about their golden goose video game, the one that is designed first and foremost to be simple enough for literal babies to play. Not only is the free roam mode not the main mode of this game, it’s even subtly hidden on the title screen in favor of the standard races. The actual structure of the game is still playing through various vs-CPU championships, unlocking characters, cars, and ultimately the final set of racetracks.

And these racetracks, man. They’re gorgeous, they’re massive, they’re beautifully designed and such a joy to run through. The previous game might be 10+ years old, but World’s expanded racetracks really feel like a true generational leap. The selection ranges from tight technical experiences like the basic Mario Circuit to much more fanciful places: rides down a waterfall, flights through the city, and ultimately the final boss of all Rainbow Roads. This game made me dig into time trial just to appreciate the courses better. They won’t get dull for a long time.

To match the size of the courses, players have a surprising amount of freedom of movement on the track: you can barrel-roll in the air to shove yourself in a certain direction, ride on most walls you can touch, even grind on rails. There’s a major Tony Hawk influence in both the multi-layered map design and this system of tricks. (Despite their total uselessness in a racing game, there are quite a few half pipes strewn around the map, because sometimes you just want to hit that big air.) When you start playing, the game feels wide open and fresh in a way I didn’t expect at all. But it’s probably best to explore the tricks in free-roam mode.

See, the weird thing about the tricks is despite their ubiquity on the courses, they don’t necessarily cause you to go faster than just driving in a straight line. Often they disadvantage you: ride a rail in multiplayer and someone will send a shell along the rail to hit you, and in many cases you can’t dodge. Get hit while catching air, god forbid, and you lose so much time that your race is pretty much over. Clearly Nintendo didn’t want to obligate players to learn complex trick mechanics or else always lose… but if the tricks don’t even help you go faster, what are they there for in the first place?

This gets us to the general imbalance and chaotic experience of the actual race. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s Mario Kart multiplayer, it’s not supposed to be balanced, the game is rigged to give everyone an exciting race, rather than one that the most skilled player will consistently win. That’s true, but everyone’s also supposed to have a good time. World is tuned so far towards chaos that I don't feel like I'm racing, half the time.

Let’s get down to the key issue: 24 racers, each carrying two potentially game-altering items, makes for way too many items getting used. Every ten seconds of a race, 48 new items get shuffled up. Everybody below 8th place has a strong chance of getting some extremely powerful or rare item that could turn the entire race on its head. And the race does get turned over… over and over again, to the point where it’s tiresome.

Racing from the middle or the front of the pack, every race is a stop-and-go frustration marathon where everyone in the race is constantly getting pelted with items, run over by a giant kart, hit by lightning, or blown up with a bomb. Formerly rare game-changer items like the paralyzing lightning bolt might now hit five or six times in a race. I regularly see two Bullet Bills at once on the screen zooming up the race order. And with the Mario Kart series’ famous rubber-banding catch-up mechanism in full effect, to get passed in World is to watch helplessly as ten other racers speed on by.

The player who manages to hold the lead is severely punished for being there, and almost always gets taken down right before the finish line and passed over. This helps contribute to a distinct feeling that nothing you do in the race even matters, a feeling so strong that veteran online MKW players have begun to purposely drive slowly and hang in the back until the final lap to game the system into giving them better items and improving their chances of winning.

(As for Vs. CPU: I am a fairly experienced arcade racer, I’ve done a bit of time attacking in MK8 and I toasted the entire vs. CPU mode in 150cc on my first try. The main thing I can say for it is that there is a level of track mastery where it no longer matters if you take a blue shell or two from the computer. Learn a proper racing line and set up your drifts right and it gets a lot easier. And try to have the speaker power-up on hand when the blue shell comes.)

Knockout Tour

More interesting— and more specifically built for this game— is the Knockout Tour mode, which leverages the world map to create long rallies where players do a lap of a race course, exit the course, and then take the highway to the next. At every leg of the race a few players get knocked out, like a battle royale game, and only four players make it all the way to the end.

Mixing up the courses this way— especially online, where the game decides the route on the fly— is a great way to pull more variety out of the many courses, and the knockout structure works better with World’s chaotic pace, forcing players to keep up or lose. The weak spot is actually the connecting highway; as many players have complained, you are on straightaways throwing shells at each other for a very long time, proportionally. A breather between courses is appreciated, but being on a long straightaway really turns the game completely towards combat, and as such reminds you of just how dominant items are in this game. Every time you miss your item pickup in this game, it really feels like you’ve lost a significant edge towards winning.

Knockout Tour feels like the real “main mode” of World, as it’s the only one that really attempts to involve the gigantic world map in the game and justify its existence. Complaints aside, this is the mode I have stuck with, and I’ve been playing online heavily since release.

Free Roam

In free roam mode, the whole map opens up and you’re able to drive to or from any track you’d like to explore, as well as the massive surrounding area. The maps are suddenly much more alive, with bustling highways and Toad and Yoshi NPCs going about their lives at the train station or the park. And of course, when you ram your go-kart into them they just kinda bounce and go YAY! The map is executed with such tremendous detail that it feels strange that they put all of this work into a side mode.

In free roam mode, you can easily miss a turn in Donkey Kong’s space port and find yourself splashing down into the ocean miles below. The game has a “rewind” button that allows you to undo such mishaps, but I really enjoyed going with the flow and just continuing to drive in whatever new place my latest driving mishap placed me. Often I found myself driving into places we would generally consider the “background” in most racing games, like exploring the control tower in Mario Circuit or the barns in Moo Moo Meadows. You can easily get lost driving here without even looking at the missions and collectibles spread about; the first time I played this game I drove aimlessly for hours without realizing the time had passed.

Despite the lack of any clear goal in free roam, collectibles are there, if you need them. Picking up one of the many Peach Medallions left around some of the most difficult locations to reach on the map will make you wonder if Mario Kart controls were really the best idea for open-world exploration. Ever had to climb the side of a building in a Mario Kart? There’s a reason they have a rewind button in this game.

Missions on the map are a quiet way of teaching the player just how many hidden shortcuts and tricks are on the race courses. Hit a P-switch on the map and you’ll be shown some kind of timed challenge to run through, usually a course shortcut or trick tutorial. The difficulty on these is all over the place, from coin-collecting gimmes to “I have to look up a Youtube tutorial to even understand how I’m supposed to do this”, but as in the rest of this mode there’s zero pressure to pass or fail. Even so, the lack of any hints in the missions can get frustrating when you run into something you have no idea how to do. “YouTube” shouldn’t actually be the solution in a friendly game like Mario Kart.

Why open world, though?

I almost didn’t buy this game. When I heard “open world Mario Kart for $80” I was entirely unmoved. I started up MK8 on my Switch 1 and I said “this is fine”. But in the end I bought Mario Kart World (for $50, as a pack-in with my Switch 2, brilliant scare tactic, Nintendo), and I wish I had been told “Tony Hawk's Mario Kart” instead, because I would have never hesitated in the first place.

Even so, it’s really tempting to ask why Mario Kart World has an open world at all. Is that just what we do now in video games? The main modes of the game only kind of put the gigantic world map to any use, and the free roam mode seems— despite being bigger than most full video games— like not quite a whole video game.

It’s easy to spend hours traversing Mario Kart World’s road-trip map, but there’s nothing to unlock or earn out there other than collecting stickers for its own sake. Again, it’s tremendously detailed for an extra mode, but it’s also not the main game. I got the distinct feeling that perhaps I was driving around an unfinished prototype, like maybe this game was meant to be Burnout Paradise by way of Tony Hawk before Nintendo decided to play it safe with their biggest seller.

Or maybe it’s just the first iteration. It’s fair to predict there will be DLC. Perhaps there will be a Mario Kart Quest. Either way, Mario Kart World looks to me like the beginning of something. Needless to say, that ride will be bumpy.