| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Nintendo Switch | 7.60 |
| Overall | 7.60 |
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I have never been a big fan of Mario Kart games, they are fine multiplayer games but always pathetic as single player experiences. Mario Kart World has the added world exploration mode to address this. Does it work, is Mario Kart World an all around great experience, not exactly but it is the best Mario Kart game I have played. First let me address the act of actually driving and playing the game, it is a ton of fun. World retains all the enhancements throughout the years with some of the best feeling kart driving around. New wall driving and rail grinding add more depth to the racing. To do this new move though you must charge a jump which is the same button as your drift, this introduces a new problem. If you are turning even just a bit you will go into a drift, to jump and activate a wall ride or grinding you must be totally straight. Half the time the car did not do what I wanted it to do, I guess one can master this but I am sure there is another button available, this is dumb that it shares the drift button. When you do activate this you can grind and bounce off walls as if you are in Tony Hawk, advanced play pulls off incredible feats. Races are as chaotic as ever, skill is only a small part of this as many times you will be in first and a series of attacks will drop you to near last place. Thats always been Mario Kart, if you arent comfortably ahead you are in the tornado of chaos that is the middle of the pack. This game desperately wants to keep you in the action so if you are toward the back you will get many items that will boost you toward the front. Its chaos but fun chaos, and if you do time trails you will see the level of skill that is needed for high lap times, it does exist, but the items do level the playing field a bit. In World the races are 24 drivers, by far the largest in series history. Tracks are larger and now connect to one another through open world highways. This all adds to the spectacle as when 24 racers are in a huge highway filled with NPC trucks, drivers, bullet bills, piranha plants and more it feels like I am on Fury Road. Explosions going off, drivers being hit on all sides, others soaring through the air, fireballs wizzing by, its incredible and its Kart at its best. There are a load of tracks and the world is pretty big to explore, I cannot complain about the amount of area there is to drive BUT there is an issue. The actual tracks have become one lap events during the cups and online matches and this has pissed off many in the community. Before each track was self contained, you do three laps, then you start a new track and do three laps there. Now a cup involves starting at one track doing a few laps and the next race starts right where you ended the previous and now you drive down a highway to the next track and only do one lap. Repeat that a few times, the majority of each race are the highways, not the actual tracks. This also happens online with no options to set it to classic style laps around a course. There is a brand new knockout mode which I love where the traveling across the map makes sense. In this mode you try to not be the last four in a race, those are eliminated, at the next checkpoint the next last four are gone and so on until four are left. This is a cross counrty race starting in one part of the map and you drive from track to track; its a great intense mode and makes use of the world very well. The traditional cups did not have to use the highways, the lack of doing laps on these tracks takes away from the best parts of the racing which are the tracks. One lap is not enough to appreciate all the detail and fun paths one can take. Time trails of each track really let you explore them, I am just baffled at the decision to not have a traditional race mode. The biggest new feature is the open world which has some content but it is not really organized. The good is that the world is just fun to drive around, remixed jazzy versions of classic Mario tunes play as you explore at your leisure. There are ? blocks all over which serve as mini missions, hit these and sometimes blue coins appear and you need to collect them all in a short amount of time. Some require you to navigate a very specific advanced path using the new jump skills. Sometimes an entire brand new race appears, these are many times classic versions of old Mario Kart races, you do a few laps, its pretty wild. More wild is there is no option to do those outside the open world. When you enter a "track" there are these ? panels on the ground, five to collect in each track. Your reward for doing so, absolutely nothing, but its one of the few things that is actually tracked. Here is the biggest issue with this game, no stat tracking, no progression meter, no rewards, there is NOTHING. All those missions in the world, it only tells you how many you have done, not how many there are, no tracking of which you did or didnt do. You collect coins everywhere, as you play milestones appear that say congrats you collected 10000 coins! Ok there is no coin tracker! What do the coins do, NOTHING. You would think an open world is a perfect way to hide new characters, unlock new costumes... well you do get new costumes but they are only tied to picking up food at one of the tons of food trucks all over the world and its a random draw if you get a new costume. None of the missions or hidden items you find unlock anything, its absurd. It is such a damn shame cause this open world is actually very very well designed. There are so many paths that cleverly connect one part of the map to another. Many times I see something and I'm like how do I get there and there is always some interesting path or trick you need to do to reach it. Then there are the main arenas, when you can explore them in any direction it really shows how brilliant their design is. There is potential for a full platformer style kart game, with bosses and everything but instead they went for the most basic presentation. Smash Bros keeps track of EVERYTHING you do, this game has nothing, I cant tell you if I've done all the missions in the world, what I have left to do. Online is supposedly where most people would be playing but once again there is NO TRACKING OF ANYTHING. Win loss record, nope? Some overall rank, I think there is some number you get, the hell if I know what it means. No progression, nothing to unlock, no higher tier comptetitions. You pick a race, you wait, you do the race, the end. Is it fun, sure, playing with others is fun. Does it work well, yeah I didn't have much lag and races started up pretty quick, very seemless online experience. But its so barebones that I have no incentive to play. Graphically it looks nice, one may look at it and say it looks like Mario Kart 8 but the amount of things on screen at once and how smooth everything runs is not possible on Switch 1. The colors and the way the world looks is impressive, I like the look, its a pretty game. Musically the soundtrack is absolutely amazing. BUT AGAIN, can you pick songs for playlist, NO. Can you unlock songs, NO. Mario Kart World is a mechanically fun, deep, and engaging racing game. Sadly it lacks even the most basic of extras, of stat tracking of anything to show that there is more here than just the most basic of start race end race. The open world is fun enough to lose hours too, but with no tracking I don't know where I have been or where I should go, it could be so much more. It is a game with plenty of content, more racers and tracks than ever, more new modes than Mario Kart, and yet it feels incredibly barebones. Maybe some DLC can make this the game it should be. For now its just a solid good game that should be great. |
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Posted by Dvader Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:37:50
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