I realised that we might have a Mario Kart World problem in our house when my sons ran up to me after our first few hours with the game, proudly showing off circular indentations on their little thumbs from holding down the accelerator button so hard. Mildly alarmed, I examined my own thumb to find the same evidence of getting over-absorbed in the knockabout, chaotic fun of our tournaments. You can play Mario Kart online now – even with video chat, in World – but it’s just not the same as playing with people on the couch next to you. I imagine this game will revive living-room multiplayer for millions of families.
God only knows how many hours I have spent racing Mario and his pals around their cartoon wonderland circuits since 1992 – this series has accompanied me through my entire life, the reliable mainstay that everyone wants to play with me, no matter how familiar they are with video games in general. I have been caught in months-long time-trial wars with my brother and my gamer friends; I have watched laughing strangers play it endlessly at the gaming pub nights that I used to run; I have dropped in and out of races over long evenings with big groups of friends; I’ve played it with almost everyone I’ve ever dated. Mario Kart World allows for all these playstyles and more, an easy-breezy social game that also lets you get extremely competitive.
It comes with a veritable Disneyland of courses: ice palaces, a jungle safari, a dinosaur park, a ski slope, a spaceport themed after the 1983 arcade version of Donkey Kong. Some feel like old Mario Kart courses, with tighter turns and clever shortcuts, designed for power-sliding and boosting around the old-fashioned way. Others are wider, more scenic voyages: every course connects to several others, so you can either race laps or drive between hot-spots on what is now a massive interconnected map, letting you drive from the seaside all the way to Bowser’s Castle at the top of a volcano.
Outside of the races you can also roam freely, going off-road or even on to the water, hunting down hidden coins and challenges: difficult trick-courses across lava fields, an unconventional route through the sky balanced on the wings of a seaplane, timed coin-collecting. This world isn’t as populous or as beautiful as something like Forza Horizon’s, but it’s still a trip to explore it with friends and find scenic little spots to gather together. The visual language is that of a group holiday: Polaroid snaps, stickers from local shops, regional foods. It’s a shame that free-roam only works online, mind – two or more players on the same console can race together, but they can’t explore together.
Speaking of trips: you can still make a Mario Kart World session feel like a tournament, if you want, running laps and competing to find the best lines through particular courses. But it seems to me that the developers want you to experience it instead as a journey. The Grand Prix competitions link courses together so you’re charting a course across this little continent, seeing all the sights as you go. Driving with 24 players on those wide routes from one course to another, it doesn’t feel so much like a race as a chaotic road trip. This is very much the vibe in Knockout Tour, a Fortnite-style elimination race where you can go from first place to 14th in two seconds and trailing players are thrown out of the race every few minutes.
The most important change, however, is not the environment, but the movement. You can now charge up a boost-jump to grind along rails, ride walls, and chain shortcuts through the more ambitious courses. This requires fighting against actual decades’ worth of drift-and-boost muscle memory, and during my first days with Mario Kart World it raised the humiliating possibility that I might now be bad at it, after all these years. But once you’ve got the hang of it, it gives racing a new feel even for those of us who’ve been karting forever, adding a bit of Tony Hawk-esque flair.
The cast of characters is broad and ridiculous. You can race as a cow, or a dolphin, or a new-look Donkey Kong hunkered hilariously over the steering wheel. (Nintendo’s venerable ape has now taken on the look that he sported in the recent Mario movie, and dabs in the air whenever you pull off a trick – I now find him nonspecifically annoying, but then, I am old.) You unlock new vehicles all the time, and new costumes for the ones who wear clothes, primarily Mario and his friends. It is impossible not to smile at Bowser in full biker leathers kicking back on an imitation Harley.
There are plenty of different assist options for kids and less skilled players, from motion-controlled steering to auto-acceleration and more: my eight-year-old could play without them, and my five-year-old was kept in the running by turning some of them on. It really is an impressively welcoming game, this, generous and detailed and unfailingly fun, different but with the same spirit. It feels like the culmination of something, a synthesis of different philosophies of fun that still nonetheless comes together. The Switch 2 itself does feel like a swish upgrade rather than an all-new console, so it’s a relief that its headline game shows that Nintendo still has a talent for reinvention.
