Mario Kart World review: a wild road excursion for all players

Gamebro.biz.id - My sons come up to me after we had played Mario Kart World for a few hours and proudly showed me the circular marks on their little thumbs from pushing down the accelerator button so hard. That's when I knew we could have a problem.  I was a little worried, so I looked at my own thumb and saw the same signs that I had gotten too into the crazy, knockabout excitement of our tournaments.  You can now play Mario Kart online, even with video chat, in World. But it's not the same as playing with friends next to you on the sofa.  I think this game will bring back multiplayer in the living room for millions of families.

Since 1992, I've spent many hours racing Mario and his friends around their cartoon paradise circuits. This series has been with me my whole life; it's the one thing that everyone wants to play with me, no matter how much they know about video games.  I've been in time-trial wars with my brother and gamer friends that lasted for months. I've seen strangers laugh and play it for hours at the gaming pub nights I used to run. I've dropped in and out of races with big groups of friends over long evenings. I've played it with almost everyone I've ever dated.  Mario Kart World lets you play in all of these ways and more. It's a fun social game that can also be very competitive.

There are so many courses to choose from, like ice castles, a jungle safari, a dinosaur park, a ski slope, and a spaceport based on the 1983 arcade version of Donkey Kong.  Some of the courses are like vintage Mario Kart tracks, with tighter curves and cunning bypasses that let you power-slide and boost around the old-fashioned style.  Some of the courses are broader and more scenic. Each track connects to numerous others, so you can either race circuits or drive between hot spots on what is now a huge map that lets you drive from the beach all the way to Bowser's Castle at the summit of a volcano.

You can also explore freely outside of the races. You can go off-road or even onto the lake to find hidden coins and challenges, like hard trick courses across lava fields, an unusual path across the sky balanced on the wings of a seaplane, and timed coin-collecting.  This environment isn't as big or as pretty as Forza Horizon's, but it's still fun to explore with friends and find pretty places to hang out.  The pictures are like those from a family vacation: Polaroid pictures, stickers from local stores, and food from the area.  It's really bad that free-roam only works online. Two or more people can race on the same console, but they can't explore together.

You can still make a Mario Kart World session feel like a tournament if you want to. You can race around the tracks and try to discover the best lines through them.  But it looks to me like the developers want you to see it as a journey instead.  The Grand Prix races connect circuits, so you're making your way across this small continent and visiting all the sites along the way.  Driving with 24 other people on those open roads from one course to another doesn't feel like a race; it feels more like a crazy road trip.  This is a lot like the feeling in Knockout Tour, a Fortnite-style elimination race where you can go from first place to 14th place in only two seconds and players who are behind are booted out every few minutes.

But the most essential change is not the surroundings; it's the movement.  You can now charge up a boost-jump to grind along rails, ride walls, and link shortcuts across the most ambitious courses.  This means fighting against years of muscle memory from drift-and-boost, and in the first few days of playing Mario Kart World, it made me feel embarrassed that I might not be good at it after all these years.  But once you get the hang of it, it adds a little bit of Tony Hawk-style flair to racing, even for those of us who have been karting for a long time.

There are a lot of silly characters in the story.  You can race as a cow, a dolphin, or a new-look Donkey Kong who is hunched over the steering wheel in a funny way.  Nintendo's old monkey now looks like he did in the most recent Mario movie. He dabs in the air everytime you pull off a trick, which I find obnoxious in a general way, but then again, I'm old.  You may always get new cars and clothes for the ones who wear them, like Mario and his friends.  You can't help but smile when you see Bowser in full biker leathers relaxing on a fake Harley.

There are a lot of various ways to help younger and less talented players, such motion-controlled steering and auto-acceleration. My eight-year-old could play without them, and my five-year-old stayed in the game by turning some of them on.  This game is incredibly welcome. It's generous, detailed, and always fun, even though it's different from other games but still has the same spirit.  It seems like the end of something, a combination of different ideas about what makes something interesting that still works together.  The Switch 2 does feel like a slick upgrade instead of a brand-new device, but it's good to know that Nintendo still knows how to make things new.

Mario Kart World is officially out. It costs £74.99 in the UK, $119.95 in Australia, and $79 in the US.

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