Who here among us hasn’t been struck by multiple shells and bananas, knocked off a track, and then immediately hit by a Bullet Bill? Getting Mario Karted, an actual term in common parlance, is something that’s happened to everybody who has played any of these games at least once. Mario Kart World is doubling down on the chaotic fun of kart racing by doubling the number of players on a track, a rally mode where you race through six courses, and giving you an opportunity to free roam and explore the entire world of Mario Kart. It’s a launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2, and it’s probably the most high-profile game in that new line up. Is it worth the asking price though? Let’s find out.
Mario Kart World has a pretty natural evolution of Mario Kart 8’s anti-gravity mechanic, where you could freely drive on the ceiling or underwater. In Mario Kart World, you can charge your jump to get a trick boost anywhere, and while that’s typically slower than simply driving straight, charge jumping opens up wall riding and grinding on electric lines or railings, which is super fun to do. World also allows you to perform multiple tricks once you’re airborne, and colliding with other racers or objects like telephone poles can give you much stronger dash boosts. Gliding from Mario Kart 7 and 8 was also removed, but now your kart transforms into a plane or boat when you reach a glider ramp, allowing you to travel through the air or above the water when necessary. If Sega isn’t going to learn from Sonic and All Stars Racing: Transformed, at least somebody is.
The tracks in Mario Kart World are beautiful and incredibly imaginative, like a theater that has a transition into black and white film, or DK Spaceport which features several direct callbacks to the Donkey Kong arcade game with a giant ape throwing barrels at you. Even returning tracks look practically brand new, redesigned to accommodate the higher number of players and the new mechanics of World. Dino Dino Jungle and Airship Fortress from Double Dash and DS, respectively, are easy new favorites with how they’ve been redesigned for World.
In World, you have access to Grand Prix mode, where you play four tracks on one of four difficulties, and Battle mode, where you and your friends can duke it out, a staple of the series. There is also the new Knockout Tour mode that pits you against other players in a six track gauntlet where you drive to and through each track. Knockout Tour is a fun twist on the standard Mario Kart races simply because of the fact that it’s pure chaos and lasts considerably longer, and there’s always some pressure to stay towards the front of the pack since last places get eliminated at set intervals.
You can race online against friends and randoms in both Grand Prix-style and Knockout Tour races, and can even participate in Battle mode against people online. You can also free roam the world, where you can wander around the full map of Mario Kart World, exploring with friends who also own the title. There’s also a way to split-screen with a friend or partner using a workaround of creating an online room for just you and your co-op partner. You can explore the world this way and find collectibles together, or just have fun goofing around in a low stress environment.
Free roam in Mario Kart World is a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be, as there are question mark panels, Peach medallions, and clear missions that pop up from P-Switches. You will also unlock most of the costumes for your characters in this mode, most likely, because you obtain costumes for the primary cast of characters by collecting Dash Food and using it, and different areas of the world have different foods available. Free roam makes a great way to cool off after an especially frustrating Mario Kart race or just to fool around in, which will likely make this a very popular mode with younger players.
Unlocking new characters in Mario Kart World is both normal and goofy, in equal measure: Some characters are unlocked by winning the Grand Prix cups, while past Mario series enemies like Cataquack and Piranha Plant are unlocked by getting hit by another racer’s Kamek item, which transforms your character and summons enemies onto the track that everyone has to dodge. This effectively means that if you want to drive around as a dolphin or bony fish, it’s an entirely random chance whether or not you’ll be able to do so within any given time frame. It’s incredibly not fun to make this purely random chance, and the Kamek item seems incredibly rare, too, with myself only having been hit by it three times after three-starring all eight Grand Prix cups on 150cc, and one of those times didn’t unlock anything because I was transformed into a character that was already unlocked.
That being said, there are a decent number of characters in Mario Kart World, and a good number of them have a variety of unlockable costumes, so you can be busy for quite a while trying to unlock everything. The actual character select screen is an abomination of graphic design, however, as every costume you unlock is given its own character slot, and by the time you’ve unlocked a variety of costumes and Kamek Orb characters, you’ll be scrolling left and right a lot on the selection screen to get to your preferred characters. It seems surreal that this was the UI design choice that was made for this new title when Mario Kart 8 had a more elegant solution of a flyout menu to pick Yoshi or Shy Guy colors after choosing your racer from a much more compact screen.
There are several new modes and twists on the formula in Mario Kart World, from its new Knockout Tour mode to free roaming the open world, but unfortunately in the most Nintendo fashion possible, there are fewer options for players to choose from when engaging with its content. Grand Prix and online play suffer the most and this is due to how these modes operate now. To explain this a little better, a Grand Prix in World has you spend two “laps” of a track on a connecting road leading from one track to another, and only the final lap is actually at the track you’re playing. These connecting roads are fine tracks in their own right, and they’re incredibly numerous to boot, but they tend to pale in comparison to the 32 tracks included in World.
These connecting tracks still have fun and exciting things to do on them like grinding on power lines, boosting on and off of walls, and dodging traffic, but they’re extremely wide with very little cornering skill required. The connecting road to Koopa Troopa Beach from Crown City is a literal straight line that counts for two whole laps of a single race when playing online, and it’s difficult to think it wouldn’t have been way more entertaining if Koopa Troopa Beach was the whole race instead. This gimmick would have been better served if relegated to the Knockout Tour mode that focuses more on this kind of thing, but it’s practically forced when you play a Grand Prix or play online with few alternatives.
It’s very obvious that the connecting passages are there to facilitate the free roam open world and to give the environment a sense of seamless connectivity. Overall, it is evident that the game designers put phenomenal planning into the transitions between courses in Mario Kart World. The downside, of course, is that these passageways need to be playable both backward and forward because when you do races online the course order doesn’t have to be 1:1 with Grand Prix mode. You’ll encounter this a lot online, at least at low rank because players are given the choice of what next track to play, and selecting any track guarantees you spend two laps on the connecting road to reach it. The only way around this is to click the random button situated all the way in the lower right corner, which will give you the standard three lap experience this series has been known for since 1992.
Unfortunately, this does mean you can’t both choose what track you’d like to play next and avoid playing on connecting roads, which is a bit of a shame. You can, however, control this more if you’re playing in Versus mode local multiplayer since you can pick to play a track without any highways involved. It wouldn’t normally be an issue, as these connecting highways are still Mario Kart tracks in their own right, but not all of these 106 connecting tracks are at the same level of quality as Boo Cinema or Great ? Block Ruins, so not having the choice for you to decide is the most Nintendo thing of all time.
It is worth mentioning that the free roam environment of Mario Kart World is cool, and it’s especially alluring to younger gamers or those who just want a relaxing time of driving around and finding various collectibles. The P-Switch challenges you can find dotted all across the map range from tutorials about various game mechanics, teaching players by forcing them to ride on a rail, then jump from the rail to wall riding, for example. Other challenges force you to use the various skills you’ve acquired during your time playing World, and there are a number of them that may take you a time or two before you complete. The strangest thing about the P-Switches is that there doesn’t seem to be a log or indication on the map that can show you what you’ve completed, which is a bit unfortunate.
Clearing the P-Switch missions, collecting Peach medallions, and finding ? panels on the map will unlock stickers, kind of like the most Nintendo-style achievement system imaginable. You can slap a sticker of your choice on your vehicle, and while they’re usually pretty tiny, they also show up next to your name when playing online, easily letting people know that you’ve cleared the toughest challenges in the game if you so choose. With these free roam collectibles yielding stickers and various food items unlocking new costumes, there’s quite a lot to do in Mario Kart World that can maintain the attention of somebody who doesn’t want to compete against their friends or randoms on the Internet.
One thing that Mario Kart World absolutely knocked out of the park is the soundtrack. The sound effects are all the standard Mario Kart sounds you’re familiar with, but the soundtrack is full of some absolutely insane numbers of jazz, swing, electronica, and other genre remixes of classic Mario tunes you’re practically guaranteed to have heard a few times in your life. The soundtrack, at least as far as can be found right now, seems to be around a whopping seven and a half hours long, and it features folksy remixes of the main theme from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, an synthwave remix of Dragon Driftway from Mario Kart 8 that features a bangin’ bass line, and other tracks that stem from the entirety of Mario’s lengthy history. It’s absolutely amazing how much work must have gone into the music production for this game, as there are so many songs and all of them are incredible.
That being said, Mario Kart World is an excellent new Mario Kart title with a lot of ambitious ideas, a great soundtrack, brilliant course design (especially for the main 32 tracks), and fun new mechanics. Whether that’s worth $80 to you is something only you can answer. If you get the Switch 2 bundle with the game, it effectively only costs $50, which definitely seems like a better price. In Mario Kart World, there’s a lot to do, a lot to see, new items to get blown out by when you’re stuck in the middle of the pack, and it’s still absolutely lots of fun since Mario Kart is one of the most accessible kart racers out there. The new free roam mode makes a great way to relax after a tempestuous race of constantly being Mario Karted in the worst ways possible, so it’s kind of like a stress ball but with more dabbing Kongs.