I feel like I’m about to say something unforgivable. I played a couple of hours of Mario Kart World recently, including a good amount of time with its new features like Knockout Tour and the open world, and came away having only had, well, quite a nice time. There were moments of hilarity – mostly involving gurning at my peers with the Switch 2’s new camera while mercilessly blue-shelling them – and moments of typical kart-racer tension. But also, a little surprisingly, moments when I felt I’d maybe rather be playing something else (the strangely alluring Welcome Tour perhaps being one option).
Mario Kart World previewDeveloper: NintendoPublisher: NintendoPlatform: Played on Nintendo Switch 2Availability: Out 5th June on Nintendo Switch 2
It’s still Mario Kart, of course, and so ultimately when you’re doing Mario Kart things – racing friends, the CPU, randoms online – you will still have a great deal of fun. More or less exactly the same amount of fun in fact as you did with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, I’d hazard a guess, as not an enormous amount has changed beside the addition of wall driving and grind rails – more on that shortly – but this really isn’t a bad thing. Deluxe rightly goes down as one of the very best kart racers ever and, as Tom Phillips mentioned in his earlier preview of Mario Kart World, it makes perfect sense to avoid diverting too much from such a magic formula. It’s only when you’re not doing Mario Kart things – namely, not actually doing any racing – that things get a little wobbly.
In fact, Mario Kart World’s best moments are those that don’t change at all, so much as just slightly enhance it. Couch co-op, with the aforementioned camera in particular, is a joy. Much has understandably been made of this camera and the mystical C-button’s positioning as a kind of punt for the Gen Zs and Alphas of this world, but – not to get too deep – in practice it’s more a reflection of how interaction has simply changed between humans overall, particularly after Covid-19 and the accompanying shifts in social media. A lot of media simply has another person’s face – or your own! – pasted over the corner of it these days. In Mario Kart that’s somehow weirdly great.
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A live camera feed of your face – all four of your faces, picked up by the one camera, if you’re playing splitscreen – is pinned onto your avatar on scoreboards, in pre-match montages, or hovering just above the back of your kart as you race by. It sounds simple and it is, but then all little strokes of genius kind of are. I find it hard to think of a time I’ve laughed harder in video games recently than when pulling faces at colleagues while haring past them through absolutely no skill of my own, stewing at my place on the leaderboard, or simply zooming in obnoxiously close when setting up the camera itself. Cue lots of crossed eyes, attempts at live recreations of the Luigi death stare, and instant come-uppances for overdoing it. Again, it’s a tiny change, but what better thing to do with a near-immaculately balanced entity like Mario Kart than to simply add an extra space for expression on top?