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A review of "Mario Kart World", my history with the franchise, and 'brand safe' fun.

(Or, I am so tired of being ‘Blue Shelled’ 3 times a match– OH FUCK NOT AGAIN!! *BOOM*)

Oh, yeah, it's been a while since they made one of these things, hasn't it? Mario Kart World is the highly anticipated sequel to the beloved Nintendo exclusive arcade racing mainstay “Mario Kart 8”. “Mario Kart 8” is one of those games that just never knew when to die, you know? This is mostly a positive development, given that after its initial release on the Wii U (an infamous failure of a console generation for Nintendo), it was then re-released on the more popular hybrid home console, the Nintendo Switch, in “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe”.

The Wii U was a complicated console. While Nintendo’s first-party games for the Wii U were solid additions to the less than popular console’s library, the industry’s third-party software support never really came about to fill in the various gaps in the system’s collection consistently, making for a disappointingly meager lineup of titles that never reached the lofty heights of its popular predecessor the Nintendo Wii, or its eventual descendant: the Switch.

“Mario Kart World” is the first installment in the popular arcade racing series since the Wii U’s “Mario Kart 8”, and the fact that it has been over 11 years since that time isn’t lost on me. It is high time we got a new entry. I am thrilled to say that (for the most part), ‘Mario Kart World’ delivers satisfying, accessible racing for all ages, that contains just the right amount of depth needed to justify a new entry on the gameplay front. Just like most Nintendo games, each Mario Kart game contains one or two crucial gameplay design ‘hooks’ that keep players engaged and motivated to interact with it.

In “Mario Kart Double Dash” for the Nintendo GameCube, there were 2-player karts, where one player drove the kart on the tracks while the other player assisted in using the various items gathered from the iconic rotating ‘Question-Mark Boxes’ floating about during races. In “Mario Kart Wii”, you had the option to select “motion controls” from the menus, which allowed players to control the karts manually by tilting their Wiimotes up and down.

“Mario Kart 8” had maybe the weakest gimmick of the recent batch of home console releases, where tracks in the game had an ‘anti-gravity’ portion to the circuit that served just to shake up matches with no greater gameplay maneuverability visually. MK8 doesn’t do much to move the series forward in any interesting or exciting way on the gameplay front, and I think it may be my least favorite of the series, gameplay-wise because it lacks a sense of creativity. It seems like a kind of bland, also-ran Mario Kart potpourri that is pleasing to the eyes and nose, but over time becomes unpleasant to interact with. I have had fun with that game, but I am not a huge fan of it or anything, I would say. I have also played a lot of MK8 Deluxe, and while it’s a good time with friends, it’s been endlessly supported with new racers, new tracks, and new things to do in the past few years, I have never really enjoyed coming back to it. It was time to get a brand-new Mario Kart, I thought.

A bit of history from me, though. I never grew up with a Nintendo console. I never owned a GameCube, Wii, Wii U, or anything home console from Nintendo, ever until my late high school years. For all the Nintendo exposure, I went over to my friends' houses to play those things. I was the odd one out a lot of times because I had an Xbox and PlayStation, and no Wii or GameCube. In some ways, it was symbiosis in our friend group where each set of friends would have something the other wouldn’t have, and we would go over to each other’s houses to play with each other’s respective things. It was cool!

It was just before this time of instant convenience we now find ourselves in. You couldn’t just play any game you wanted whenever. You had a select number of games and movies that you played and watched all the time, and when you got something new to add to your collections, it was a BIG deal. Sure, the internet existed, and multiplayer gaming was a thing on PC and early Xbox during this early era for me, but it was years and years before my family decided to get internet in the house. For the better part of a decade, my siblings and I didn’t have internet access.

It wasn’t until 2014-2015 that my parents finally decided to get service in our rental after years of not having it. My parents never really understood the internet, and honestly, they’re doing a better job these days of being more tech-savvy than around 10 years ago, so I’ll give them kudos for that. But the internet in the house just wasn’t a thing for us as kids. We did have some video games, but not a ton of them, and my mother was very strict about when and how we were going to play them. It was only on weekends, and only if we got all of our homework and chores done. Then we could play for an hour on Saturdays. That was it for the whole week. A lot of work for just an hour, no? But I figured it was better than nothing.

What I was allowed to have, though, that (weirdly) wasn’t limited in playing time (for some reason), was my purple Game Boy Advance. I had like 3 or 4 games for that thing. I had a couple of bad original Game Boy games on it, and a couple of Game Boy Advance games. The two standouts for me came from the Advance side of things, with “Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue”, a limited scope demake of the PS2 console game of a similar name, and the creme de la creme of the meager library I owned: “Mario Kart: Super Circuit” my favorite of the franchise to this day. I played countless hours of Super Circuit, powered only by Dollar Tree batteries and guided by the light of the blazing Missouri sun.

It was a glorious time. I never felt the sting of how many games I owned on it, because “Mario Kart: Super Circuit” was all I needed. I completed that game weekly for many months, doing everything I could do, and when I was done, I would wipe my save and do it all over again. I loved that game so dearly. Tragedy eventually struck when I lost my Game Boy Advance while on a long car ride with family. I think we were coming back from visiting family in Texas. I’m not sure. But it got misplaced somehow, and with it, too, unfortunately, went my coveted cartridge of “Mario Kart: Super Circuit”. I can scarcely think of a time when I have been more upset about losing a valuable item of mine in my life. I was completely distraught and continued to be for many days following.

So, besides dabbling with “Mario Kart DS”, “Mario Kart Wii”, and original MK8 at friends’ houses, I had very little exposure to Mario Kart as a franchise outside of the GBA and Switch rerelease of their games. I played a lot of MK8 Deluxe as well but ended up losing a fair amount of steam on it over time as the Switch’s library increased and the years wore on. So we find ourselves here. 11 years after the past release of “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe” comes “Mario Kart World” to take its place during the launch window of a brand new console generation. It’s an exciting time!!

With the newest game in the series, “Mario Kart World”, Nintendo has polished its base gameplay to a stellar shine, while adding even more to the core conceit of racing against its stable of iconic, whimsical characters. The roster here is great and has a lot of returning faves from previous titles, but has strangely omitted the cross-universe characters from Deluxe, like the Inkling Boy and Girl from Splatoon, and Link from The Legend of Zelda. I do expect in the future they will either re-add racers missing from the final roster of their previous games, or implement a bunch of new ones from Nintendo’s history. They’ll “Smash Bros.” this thing up, I expect.

Selecting racers is a mess, however. The menu to select both the racer you want as well as their Kart is frankly a huge step down from MK8 Deluxe. When you receive either new vehicles or new costumes (gathered during racing) for your characters, a new slot in the grid gets added for even costumed variants of characters, rather than a submenu like “Smash Bros.” has, to alter their appearance. It’s frankly awful. The fact that it made it in this state is a huge oversight, in my opinion.

The new stuff here boils down to the ‘Kart’ as a vehicle, and what it can do. You can grind rails, wall jump, and even fly to start, and all these new bits of mechanical locomotion make the driving here that much deeper and more satisfying. If you have played any Mario Kart game, you get the gist of the format of races. For normal Cups, you have 4 racing circuits, each with 3 laps apiece. The higher you place per race, the better score you will attain, which, when combined at the end of a Grand Prix, with give you your final standings and placement for the victory circle. The single-player portion of this game consists of ‘3-starring’ all of the tracks on every Cup, all on the fastest speed, 150cc, a departure from previous Mario Kart entries, with 200cc being the max speed for races. It’s unclear why that speed setting was removed here in Mario Kart World, but I digress.

There are the normal cups on the regular Grand Prix, and there is also the returning Battle Mode, where you and some friends or lowly NPCs duke it out in kart battles to pop balloons with items found in item boxes, with the last one standing claiming victory. I’ve never really been a fan of this mode, but dabbling from time to time with it can be some fun. It’s not really what I come to Mario Kart for if I am honest. The big new addition to the core modes here comes in the form of the Knockout Tour: a cross-country racing sprint end-to-end with 6 1-lap races. This mode is very cool and extremely difficult to win, given the placement parameters. The idea in this mode is to keep above the placement threshold at each checkpoint to make it to the end. Only one can win, though, and this push and pull between yourself and the 23 other racers is brilliant fun.

Herein lies one of my gripes with the game, however. Knockout Tour shines in its format as being an extra challenging ‘super-max’ version of normal Grand Prix Cups, but with the number of kart racers in a race being raised from MK8 Deluxe’s cap of 12 racers, to now 24 challengers in World, and the amount of item spam being effectively doubled from item boxes throughout races– getting end-to-end while avoiding catastrophe remains a taller task than ever here. Especially given just how much ‘item spam’ you have to be aware of in matches, be it online or single-player. I think being in first place is by far the worst place you can be for the majority of a race, given that with multiplied spawn rates for items, and more racers using those higher rates of items, you can easily go from first to worst in a matter of mere moments.

It’s akin to the reams and reams of random bullshit that is ever present in Mario Party, I think. Sometimes it can be fun, but most of the time it feels like punishment for no reason. That sort of philosophy in game design has always rubbed me the wrong way, and Nintendo, more than any other company in games, gets away with that sort of juvenile discipline. For some weird reason, they feel this need to keep their ‘party game’ players in line with arbitrary rules, archaic punishments, and all-around odd design choices to stupefy folks just looking for a good time. Mostly, I chalk this behavior up to poor design. It is consistently baffling that this happens from time to time, because Nintendo frequently has many strokes of genius in their games, but this sort of coddling or ‘faux-parental advisory’ tempers the quite brilliant choices they often do have while making video games.

In a recent match (no joke), I got blue-shelled three times while consistently getting in first. This aspect of the game feels just straight-up broken. A good balance patch could fix these issues, sure, but for now, it feels incredibly frustrating to play races amidst the high player count and random happenstance of item calamity that gets hurled your way frequently.

Nintendo often sparks the imagination with these ‘eureka’ moments of gameplay in their games. There are frequent moments of sheer brilliance displayed through Nintendo games that can scarcely be rivaled by other peers or wannabes in the industry. I find that Nintendo is, however, just as prone to fits of frustrating design and confounding ‘rules’ that bind just as much as promote player expression in their games. A lot of their titles toe the line of being ‘brand safe’ while also constantly innovating in large swathes for game design, presentation, and artistic merit. It reeks of a possibility space levied by creatives, tempered ultimately by a corporation’s mandated idea of ‘safe enjoyment’ that has been agreed upon in board rooms. You can only have so much fun with a Nintendo game until some random draconian rulekeeper comes along to drop the law down. No Nintendo game is devoid of this. Every game they make has some sort of odd shortcoming or restriction that hampers the complete enjoyment of their products for me. No more is this evident than in the biggest addition to this new Mario Kart entry: the open world.

There is a massive possibility space here, full of exciting potential. Nintendo has the right idea here, and the scope to accomplish a premise for a thrilling structure, but ultimately, they fall woefully short of delivering upon that featured promise in this setting.

There is so much they could have done here. So many interesting ideas they could’ve implemented in the open world in this game that they just don’t do. Now, this could be due to future additions to a wide playspace, like future content updates. New circuits, cups, racers, et cetera, could be (and most likely are) on the horizon, but I think I chalk up this massive oversight to mainly one thing. They don’t know what to do with it. This is heavily apparent given the type of activities they offer you in the open world. This is such a missed opportunity, in large part because this could have been their ‘Breath of the Wild Moment’ for Mario Kart as a series if they did literally anything with this portion of the game. But they don’t. Or they do the bare minimum.

So much opportunity is squandered here. Nintendo has years and years of legacy involved in this series, and while they gesture lightly at their history here in random tidbits littered all over the map, they don’t do anything with those little tokens of nostalgia in any meaningful way. What would I want from something so vague? I am not entirely sure. But that’s not my job here, either. It feels like lots of this game’s interesting parts are missing. Maybe… some attention to detail? Maybe some interesting things to do for activities? They could have done anything. It’s one of the biggest whiffs for an exciting feature I can remember seeing in a big AAA game.

What’s there on offer is slim. When you aren’t racing, you can drive around. Stay on the road, though, because the second you go off-road, your kart goes about half the speed as on a regular track. Which adds even further to this frustrating section of the game, for me. You drive around, collect very few collectibles like coins, do obstacle courses activated by ‘P’ sections of road throughout the landscape, and collect costumes for your racers that you can find in these drive-thru ‘Yoshi’ branded food trucks dotting the winding tracks. The racing to and from places remains great, but the context for why you would do anything in the open world is barely there. Why would you just drive?

This could have been Mario Kart’s version of “Burnout Paradise”, where you are racing with up to 24 other racers doing fun challenges and smashing through large Nintendo-themed billboards, for instance. They want you to exist with your buddies here, too. They gesture frequently at it basically being a huge lobby to enter into online races, but again, you could just do this at the menu, so why bother? You can also take pictures with either yourself or a friend, but this also feels very underbaked. This whole open-world area is quite frankly a mess. I wish they did more with it. It is just not enough.

So, nearing the end of this review, I am honestly pretty mixed on the final product writ large. Again, like most of Nintendo’s games, it is prone to strokes of genius in both its gameplay and presentation, but the nagging sense of the perfunctory open-world addition hangs on my brain at every juncture. This, paired with the doubling of the number of racers and the issues I have with the item box RNG for this increased player count, makes Mario Kart World often extremely frustrating to engage with. Here’s to hoping they fix these bigger issues with updates going forward because if it is anything like MK8 Deluxe, they should support this game for years to come, I imagine. The smart additions to the gameplay make this one the best-feeling game in the series yet. I like the colorful roster and the customization of racers with costumes you can find is a neat addition to the presentation. But with all the structural issues I have with its makeup, I can’t in good conscience highly recommend this game.

I can give it a recommendation with some caveats, I think, though. Chances are if you have gotten a Switch 2 or will soon, you will get this game, but I also don’t know if you should run out and get it at ‘MSRP’ if you didn’t buy it with a Switch 2 console bundle. Another large hurdle of this game is its hefty $80 price tag, the first of its kind in the industry. This practice has already emboldened other companies to follow suit as well, so we have that to look forward to shortly.

I would say even for how premium this game can look, feel, and play, I think with the mound of issues I have with it, I don’t think this game is worth that daunting cost. “Mario Kart World” is a good game, not a great one ultimately, and I think that matters. When I see what is there compared to what it could have been, I feel pretty disappointed by it. It should have been so much more.

‘Blue Shells’ need to be banned, by the way.

As always, keep gaming.