Mario Kart World – The Final Preview
Mario Kart World is an inevitability. After Mario Kart 8 Deluxe became an almost mandatory purchase for the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo is banking on Mario Kart World holding the same position for the Switch 2. There’s some big, bold new ideas that look to make this feel like a new generation of kart racer, most notably the jump to racing through an open world.
With the Switch 2 launching later this week, we’ve been able to spend a few hours with Mario Kart World at a preview event ahead of time. That’s let us dip into a bunch of the standard tracks, mess about with the many, many characters in the game, the open world and its P-button challenges, and the Knockout Tour elimination mode.
There’s some great touches throughout the game and it’s clear that, with Nintendo having first thought of trying to bring this game’s open world vision to the original Switch, they pushed on in what they were trying to do when shifting focus to the Nintendo Switch 2. So there’s some key things like being able to shift seamlessly from the main menu to driving around in the open world – no loading screens, just start driving from where that camera is pointing – and a mini-map that is a little birds eye view camera of the world, instead of an outline map. More fundamentally, there’s the wave simulations that roll through the large bodies of water that, while we’ve absolutely seen this kind of wave tech before – famously with Wave Race 64 – can be a taxing computational element to feature when also doing open world and fast multiplayer racing with larger lobbies. Maybe this could all have worked on the original Switch, but not when pushing 60fps or when pushing four-player local split-screen.
Of course, it really is the core Mario kart racing that matters the most here, and there’s that immediate familiarity that you’ll feel in nailing that boost start timing and setting off to drift through corners and fling items at your rivals. It’s Mario Kart through and through… but it’s also a little bit different in ways that can challenge your muscle memory.
In particular, there’s the new wall-riding and rail-grinding additions that add new tricks to the sides of tracks and areas – at the same time, the hover kart mode has fallen by the wayside in favour of transforming vehicle forms to let this happen. The thing is that you need to jump at walls, and if you’ve missed the on-ramp for a grind rail, to hop up onto the wall. To do that, you need to hold the right shoulder button and no directional inputs at all. A quick tap of the right shoulder button doesn’t jump high enough, so you need to charge it up… but any direction movement alongside that will still hop into a drift. It takes time, thought and effort to do this after so many games learning this behaviour.
For the most part, these additional movement types are a nice extra. Grinding on the rail doesn’t increase your speed, but does give the opportunity to trick and gain mini boosts for a marginal advantage, and it seems that there’s almost always a secondary drop-down area if they ever are the primary route through.
The jump across to open world has brought other big changes to the game. There’s all these race tracks dotted across the world, some new, some returning, and they can all be raced in a traditional fashion… or you can race between them. In Grand Prix cups, the first race is always at a track, but each race after starts at the previous circuit, races to the next track, and finishes off with one or a few laps of it. It’s a huge change that makes the point-to-point racing that was a rare highlight of previous games into the main event of Mario Kart World. That’s before you consider the Knockout Tour, which joins up the open world roads through a bunch of circuits, knocking out the last four racers at each checkpoint and building up the pressure section-by-section.
It creates this odd blend of bespoke circuits that can be tight and twisty, lean in on certain ideas and themes, but that are then joined up by these big broad roadways. There’s huge banks of item boxes that are impossible to miss, there’s long straights and gently twisting sections that provide minimal challenge, but that doesn’t make them boring to drive. After all, there’s always the chaos of items coming your way, while road traffic that comes with ramps, has Hammer Bros. flinging hammers off the back of the truck, and more. Maybe it’s a wide open sea that you sail across, bouncing over waves and tricking as you do to get every slight advantage that you can.
That open world is, of course, completely open for you to explore at your leisure, whether when playing solo, or when waiting for your lobby of friends to fill up and the host to select the game mode. It’s interesting to see how Nintendo has tried to fill in the blank areas with P-buttons, giving mini missions and challenges that test your driving skill. Race around and collect blue coins, whizz through checkpoints, linking together rail grinds, jumps and more with perfect timing, you know what to expect. The handful that I saw weren’t mind-blowing, but they’re going to be fun to find, and can scratch that itch that all high score and skill check challenges can do.
I almost feel that Nintendo is embracing some of the quirky messiness that open world racers can have. There’s bound to be boring patches of the world, weird end points like a pipe at the end of a sky road that just spits you back out to go the other way, and the ability to just fling yourself into areas that were not intended for you to visit. So Nintendo has just rolled with it in other areas, like the character list.
All the main cast have been lavished with love, given multiple costume variants to find by driving through and using meal items when racing, and all the animations that you’d expect. Then there’s the sensation and delight of Cow being a playable character, having adorable little animations while jumping that have made her an immediate fan favourite. And then there’s the third tier, with characters that just… well that just don’t make sense. How can Sidestepper drive? This giant-eyed crab just sits in a car with both claws up in the air, and is revealed to have feet dangling off the sides of a bike, with a kind of horror in their eyes as they look out from the screen at you. And Fish Bone, which can have even less contact between its fishy skeleton and your chosen vehicle. I love that they’re there, and they’re kind of hilarious to see in the character select screen, but they also feel a bit like Nintendo gave in to the concept, instead of truly mastering it.
Regardless, this is both a bold new direction for this series, and yet one that remains familiar. You can still just race around tracks if you wish, selecting them manually, and even creating point-to-point races that you won’t see within the main Grand Prix or Knockout Tour mode. And there’s also Battle Mode, which has the usual mix of of bespoke arenas and repurposed track sections to race through. This is a lot of fun in split-screen, and if you have the Switch 2 camera set up and everyone’s mug on screen to highlight your human rivals, the competitiveness that everyone feels when playing Mario Kart shines through.
We won’t have to wait too long before we see how all of this comes together. Mario Kart World is out in just two days alongside the Nintendo Switch 2, and it’s bound to be the first game that almost anyone that buys this console plays, maybe even the only game for the first first months.
