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-Switch 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 will challenge your muscle memory.
In particular, the new wall-riding and rail-grinding additions add new opportunities to the sides of tracks and through key areas. They’re tricky to pull off, and if you miss the start of a rail, you need to do a large jump to get up onto it. This move has you hold the right shoulder button and no directional inputs, fighting against the now instinctive way that you hop into a drift around a corner. Worse, any directional movement will still hop into a drift, which might be the last thing you want to do. It takes time, thought and effort to learn 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 are the primary route through an area.
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, cannons, 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 constantly 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-Switches, giving mini missions and challenges that test your driving skill. Race around and collect blue coins, whizz through checkpoints, link 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 same itch that all high score and skill check challenges do.
I almost feel that Nintendo is embracing some of the quirky messiness that open world racers can have, doing so out of necessity. There’s bound to be boring patches of the open world, weird end points like a pipe at the end of a corkscrew road that just spits you back out to go the other way, and the ability to just fling yourself across rooftops and other areas that were not intended for you to visit. So Nintendo has had to just roll with it in some areas, and embrace it in others, like the character roster.
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 much sense. How can Sidestepper drive? This big-eyed crab just sits in a car with both claws up in the air, and just has feet dangling off the sides of a bike, with a kind of out of control horror in their eyes as they look out from the screen at you. And then 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 hilarious to see for the first time in the character select screen, but they also feel a bit like Nintendo kind of gave in to the concept, when they’re usually the ones in complete control.
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 and ignore the open world races, or you can race 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 also 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.
