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- Knockout Tour is one of the best things that's happened to Mario Kart in years - Superb soundtrack - Beautiful, crisp visuals - Love all of the driver costumes - The new course structure is very creative and thoughtful
- One lap through each course in Grand Prix isn't enough to experience the visuals and course theme - Some new items aren't great/unnecessary changes to existing items - Some new drivers feel like filler - Rubber-banding CPUs
Let’s address the elephant in the room immediately so we can get it out of the way: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe set a high bar for the franchise that is going to be really hard for other entries to clear, and Mario Kart World didn’t quite clear it.
World is a beautiful, fun, unique Mario Kart experience that does something new and fresh with the series, and I haven’t been able to put it down since it launched. But after eight years of Deluxe being the main Mario Kart experience, it was inevitable that comparisons would be made. Which is the “better” game? While that’s always going to be a subjective question, I’d say Deluxe still reigns supreme as the definitive Mario Kart game. However, World holds its own and introduces some fun mechanics to turn the core Mario Kart experience on its head.
As expected, there are Grand Prix cups with four courses per cup, but the structure of each course is much different this time around. The first race of each cup is the only race that’s three laps around a closed course and begins with all drivers stopped at the finish line. The remaining three courses all begin in motion, and the racers have to drive to the next location. The first two laps typically pass while on the road to the destination, with the final lap happening as you drive through that end destination.
For example, the Flower Cup begins in Desert Hills, with a standard three laps around a closed course. The next course is Shy Guy Bazaar, but you don’t start the course at the bazaar. Instead, the second race begins in motion, on the road traveling to the bazaar. For laps one and two, you race through a treacherous desert and sandstorm before the sand clears and you see a palace in the distance and a highway emerge. You race down the busy road, weaving through commuter traffic, then enter the gates of Shy Guy Bazaar — and lap three begins. You’ll speed through the stalls of Shy Guys hawking their wares and cheering the racers as they speed by, then exit the bazaar by soaring over the sands past a Shy Guy on a flying carpet. After you cross the finish line and the third race to Wario Stadium begins, you’ll notice the environment has changed. Night has fallen as you leave the bazaar behind and drive through the desert to your next destination.
This is a very cool, very creative change to the Mario Kart formula that I wasn’t expecting and took some time to grow on me. Initially, I didn’t care for it and felt like it cheated me out of getting to see much of the actual course since you spend more time on the road getting there. I thought it was an especially weird choice for this game because even though some courses from previous games are included, they’re not 1:1 remakes. They’re more like reimaginings inspired by those courses, which makes me want to see them even more. To some extent, I do still feel a bit mixed on the new course structure, but my appreciation for the creativity involved in each course and how well designed they all are outweighs my other feelings at this point.
The transition from road to destination is seamless, and you can see the gradual, natural change in environment as you get closer to the course. There are hilarious road hazards, like crazed road raging drivers that drop Bob-ombs from their cars as they zoom across lanes, Piranha Plants, Hammer Bros, and Chargin’ Chucks attacking drivers, giant rolling Bob-ombs, and more. And these road trips are where you’ll find bags of Dash Food at various roadside food stands. The size of the meal inside the bag will determine how large of a speed boost you get, but if you’re using the right driver on the right course and you eat a regional food, you’ll unlock a new version of that driver wearing a special costume.
The roster in this game is large, but at the same time it’s filled with filler characters that baffle me. World takes some of its content from Mario Kart Tour, including some of the costumes, like Yukata Peach, Vacation Peach, and Happi Mario (with a slightly different design). Tour has a massive roster with incredibly creative costumes, yet in World we get drivers like a cow, a penguin, a dolphin, and a snowman? It felt like such a letdown after the rosters of both Deluxe and Tour, especially seeing how they took designs from the latter for this game. It’s very likely Nintendo is gearing up for DLC in the future, but I’d much rather have had Ninja Shy Guy or Poochy over some of these characters that make no sense. It’s also strange that they didn’t bring back all of the alternate colors for Shy Guy and Yoshi.
While Mario Kart 8‘s gimmick was going anti-grav, World’s is jet skiing, wall riding, and grinding rails. Unfortunately, there are no underwater tracks in this game, which was a major disappointment for me. But I will say that the jet ski mechanics in this game reminded me of the Wave Race series at times, which was a lot of fun, especially on the majorly choppy waves of Wario’s Shipyard and the rapid waters of Cheep Cheep Falls. The rail grinding is cool, especially when you have the opportunity to jump from rail to rail, but it isn’t a mechanic I’ve been going out of my way to use. Same with wall riding. It’s a bit tricky to pull off, but once you do it’s a bit underwhelming and never really felt like the payoff was worth the effort.
World introduces some new items, like Kamek. It’ll cause various effects to happen on the road ahead of you, like making a wave of enemies or Bob-ombs appear on the track, or it’ll turn everyone briefly into a different racer. When it happens to you, if you get turned into a character that you haven’t unlocked yet, they’ll be added to your roster. The Coin Shell barrels forward, hitting anyone in its path and leaving a trail of coins in its wake. The Ice Flower, which made its Mario Kart debut in Tour, gives you the power to shoot ice balls all over the road. The ? Block gives you some coins and a burst of speed with each hit.
Changes have been made to existing items. Crazy 8 is gone. The Golden Mushroom is slower; don’t expect to go quite as rapid fire with it anymore, which is a really lame and unnecessary change. The visual effects of Lightning, the Blue Shell, and the Super Horn are a little more comic book inspired. Sound effects like “KABOOM” appear over the driver’s head upon impact with the Blue Shell, and Lightning has more of a Looney Tunes slapstick effect when it hits. The sound effects for the Green and Red Shells have been changed to sound more like they did in Super Mario Bros.. The Feather is back in normal races (as opposed to battle modes) for the first time since Super Mario Kart. It can either give you major air at the right time or be a hinderance or even a liability that can accidentally send you soaring over the edge of a track. I don’t love the feeling of the Feather in this game and am still trying to figure out the best use case for it. One benefit of it, however, is that you can repeatedly tap L after using it for some minor speed boosts, though they aren’t very significant.
The Knockout Tours are endurance runs that take you through four tracks without breaks. In order to continue on to the next course, you have to make it to the finish line ranked in one of the top spots, which change with each race. The first race is more forgiving about how far behind you can be once you cross the finish line, but with each race you have to fight harder to stay at the front of the pack. I’ve been having a lot of fun with these and love the chaos of so many drivers on screen fighting to make it on to the next race. It’s high energy and high intensity.
Free Roam is an interesting mode. From the game’s main menu, you can press start to instantly start driving as the character on the screen, wherever they happen to be on the world map. You can also navigate down to the map and choose where you’d like to go instead. You can explore the world as any driver; this is a great opportunity to experiment with different drivers and Dash Food on different courses to try to unlock costumes. There are P Switches scattered across the world, which trigger all sorts of challenges that you can take on within a limited amount of time, and retry as many times as you’d like. Many of these are beneficial for helping you improve your grasp on some of the game’s mechanics. If you just want to explore the wide world and how all of the tracks are interconnected — which is pretty impressive — this is the mode for you.
Multiplayer has been smooth for me so far. I haven’t experienced some of the connectivity issues of Deluxe, like getting dropped suddenly, seeing drivers moving strangely, items not interacting with opponents as they should, etc.
I was surprised and impressed by how much the AI has been improved over previous games. The CPU players are smarter, more aggressive, and much more of a challenge. It’s been much harder to achieve three-star rankings on Grand Prix cups than in other entries in the series. While I definitely welcome the challenge, I don’t like some of the incredibly annoying rubber-banding the opponents do in this game. When I say that their bounce backs are instant, I mean that literally. There have also been times where they come from absolutely nowhere and eke out a win in the last fraction of a second. I had no idea where they came from and had no chance to cut them off.
Playing Tour helped me somewhat with adjusting to World eliminating the need to hold the item button to hold items behind you, but only somewhat. However, I do welcome the other change introduced from Tour: Bob-ombs no longer hurting you if they explode while you’re holding one. At the same time, it feels like both of these changes were meant to make it less difficult for players to become competitive, which seems very much in line with the Nintendo hand-holding epidemic I’ve been yelling into the void about for years now.
The ratio of Blue Shell to Super Horns has felt off to me. In Grand Prix, there’s a minimum of one Blue Shell nearly every race for me (at least on 150cc), but I’m not getting the Super Horn anywhere near as frequently as the Blue Shells are coming. Maybe I just have terrible luck. But it’s felt like I’m totally defenseless against it and just have to accept that I’m getting hit with the Blue Shell once a race if I’m in first. You can still use a Mushroom to escape a Blue Shell at the last second, but the timing is slightly different than it was in Deluxe, as I learned the hard way after a few failed attempts. But this game feels extremely Blue Shell happy and it’s a bit annoying.
World is a downright beautiful game. As its name suggests, the tracks will take you across a variety of landscapes, vistas, and destinations. Cheep Cheep Falls is my second favorite track in the game (after Shy Guy Bazaar): gorgeous Japanese temple grounds set against a fall background, maple leaves, and a rushing river filled with Cheep Cheep. Wario’s Shipyard is dark and stormy, with tall, crashing waves and remnants of ships that have seen better days. Boo Cinema will take you on a surreal ride through a haunted theater and into the film itself, with trippy visuals and an overall unique experience for a Mario Kart track.
The game’s soundtrack is great. It’s a combination of Mario Kart songs and songs from other Mario games, all of which are performed in a variety of musical styles. There’s everything from stage music from Super Mario 64 and Mario Bros. 3 to the character select theme from Super Mario Bros. 2. In Grand Prix, each course has its own theme, but during the first couple of laps on your way to the destination, different tracks will play. The only issue is that, regardless of the mode, because you spend so little time in each course, you only get to hear a short bit of the course tracks and spend most of the game listening to these new renditions of older Mario Kart tracks or themes from other Mario games. And that really sucks, because there are some great renditions of the game’s course themes, like Airship Fortress, that you only get to hear for the duration of a lap.
I applaud Mario Kart World for taking some chances with a much loved franchise and doing something totally new with it while keeping the foundation of the game at its core. The new mode and new course structure are so much fun to play. It also feels like there was a genuine creative passion driving this game, which comes through in the design of the courses and the sheer breadth of songs in the soundtrack. But at the same time, some of the game’s changes and introductions aren’t great, weren’t necessary, and leave it feeling like it was so close to being a bullseye but just missed the mark instead.
It will be hard for Nintendo and Mario Kart to step out from under the shadow of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. But that’s what happens when you make an amazing game. As I said earlier, I fully expect Nintendo to come out with DLC for this game, so time will tell what content they’ll release that could improve the experience. Overall it’s solid, fun, innovative, just not what I would want as the definitive Mario Kart experience, nor do I feel it tops what has long been considered the definitive Mario Kart experience for some time. But this is certainly a fresh take on the franchise that’s keeping things new and fun, and I’m having a blast with it.
