The best theme park rides put an emphasis on immersion. For a brief few minutes, you find yourself transported to a world far different from our own. As you look around you, you’ll find fleeting hints in the distance about locations and characters you’ll never get to see for more than a second. On Universal’s Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man, or Disney’s It’s a Small World, we look around, hoping to find some detail we missed the first time we rode (or on the hundredth). The Mario Kart series operates largely the same way. For more than three decades, Nintendo has offered tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond the courses we explore, while keeping riders safely in their established lane. Until Mario Kart World, that is.
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The big hook of Mario Kart World is that, for the first time in the series, players aren’t just visiting separate and disconnected courses. Everything links together to form one big world, and there’s an actual cohesiveness that makes it feel unified. Courses now run right into one another, with each Cup representing a divided segment of an overall map. Those Cups are still broken down in Grand Prix mode like you’d expect to see in a standard Mario Kart game, though the number of laps can vary. While Mario Kart 8 still looks really impressive after all these years, Nintendo has taken great advantage of the Switch 2 hardware. The courses all look fantastic, and you can really see how Nintendo has improved on small details, like the clouds in the sky, and the overall colors and lighting effects.
On top of the standard Cups, Mario Kart World has a new Free Roam mode, which allows players to traverse the game’s connected world, looking for missions and secrets. As a result, locations that felt just out of reach in previous Mario Kart games are now areas you can go explore. It gives the world an actual lived-in feel, and for the first time outside of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario Kart really feels like it somehow connects together with all of the other Mario family games. In my early hands-on with the game back in April, I was unsure whether the courses all made up one giant world, or if they were disconnected “zones.” To my relief, you really can visit everything as you drive throughout Free Roam.
Exploring the game’s connected world would get boring quickly if there wasn’t anything to do. Thankfully, players can test their mettle in Mario Kart World‘s P-Switch missions, which are strewn throughout the map. These missions are short tasks that help to break up the standard Mario Kart gameplay, while also teaching players a lot of the intricacies of the series. The lessons you learn in P-Switch missions carry over to the main game, making you think more about the timing you put into item use, or the best point to do a trick in mid-air. The world map isn’t exactly Breath of the Wild when it comes to the amount of content or freedom it offers. However, it’s big and well-designed, and it offers a fun distraction between races.
If there’s one downside to Free Roam mode, it’s the fact that the rewards are pretty lackluster. The P-Switch challenges themselves are fun, but the incentives fail to excite. I liked earning the various stickers, and the idea of applying them to your vehicle is a neat touch, though some extra customization would have been nice. Being able to slap a whole bunch on one vehicle and being able to save custom designs would have made the concept a little bit stronger. Free Roam should have also offered more options for interacting with the music. Mario Kart World features incredible remixed tracks spanning the Mario franchise; an option to make playlists to listen to while cruising the map would have been very welcome.
The connected world concept extends to nearly every facet of Mario Kart World. While Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had a bunch of guest characters and tracks from Nintendo franchises like Animal Crossing and Zelda, that would have felt out of place in Mario Kart World. Instead, the developers brought in a bunch of new drivers that fit more naturally into the world of Mario. As a result, the game added what the developers refer to as “NPC drivers.” These characters previously existed as obstacles in the Mario Kart series, but now get to race alongside the rest of the main crew. This has provided the game with some of its more entertaining additions, including the fan-favorite Cow, as well as Sidestepper, an enemy that first appeared in the Mario Bros. arcade game from 1983.
On top of new single-player content, Mario Kart World has added to the multiplayer options with the excellent new Knockout Tour mode. Knockout Tour is one of the most frantic and challenging additions the Mario Kart series has ever seen. The mode pits 24 players against one another in an elimination race. With each track, players are given a spot they must place in order to continue on. As Knockout Tour continues on, those who fail to place in a top spot are eliminated, until just one racer remains. The result is an adrenaline-fueled challenge that requires a lot of skill to just stay in the race, let alone place first. Mario Kart World‘s developers have said that the mode couldn’t be pulled off on the original Switch, and it’s easy to see how the new system’s extra processing power has been put to use.
All of these new additions add up to a Mario Kart experience that feels faithful to what has come before, without making it feel redundant. Mario Kart World is every bit as familiar as you’d want it to be, but the developers found so many ways to make the experience unique. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe exists as one of the best games the series has ever produced, and the Booster Course Pass DLC significantly increased the amount of courses and racers available to players. Given that, there was clearly a lot of challenge in how to approach the next game in the series. Thankfully, Mario Kart World has built on the recipe in ways that add up significantly.
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Playing Mario Kart World is like stepping off the boat on a Disney Parks ride and finding a whole world that had always been out of reach. For the first time since 1992, Nintendo has provided a take on Mario Kart where players can see how everything connects and comes together. In that regard, Mario Kart World is the most ambitious game in the series thus far. It’s hard to top what Nintendo pulled off with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but this feels like a really smart expansion on the core Mario Kart concept. Free Roam could use a little more meat to it, and the game needs some more quality-of-life options, but Mario Kart World offers an excellent starting point for the Nintendo Switch 2 era.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Mario Kart World is available now on Nintendo Switch 2. A code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
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