Mario Kart World is a very different Mario Kart game. It’s still recognizable as a Mario Kart, and if you’re just watching it, it probably looks like “Just More Mario Kart”, but it really is very very different.

Right off the top, there’s a ton of new stuff that’s unquestionably amazing. The tracks are fantastic across the board, tons of variety, there are remakes but nothing feels like a “port”, it feels like a reimagining. The tracks are absurdly lush, visually stunning, and absolutely full to the gills with stuff: crowds, breakable physics items, alternative routes, etc. It’s all great, some of the best tracks they’ve ever put out.

The overall aesthetic of the game is spectacular, everything is crisp, colorful, highest-rez and framerate as we’ve ever had, and it’s solid. There is no slowdown and given the amount of ludicrous stuff they crammed into these tracks that is truly astounding. The soundtrack is also fantastic, with what seems like dozens of brand new arrangements of Mario, Mario Kart, and Mario-Adjacent music. Nintendo needs to fill the Nintendo Music app with this stuff IMMEDIATELY.

World brings two big “surface level” changes: the tracks are placed on a huge cohesive world instead of just being isolated tracks, and the simultaneous player count has doubled to an unbelievable 24 simultaneous racers. Those are the “big” changes you can put on a box and easily explain (like “omg now you have anti-grav sections” in MK8), but it’s really the side-effects of those changes that really dramatically set this entry apart from its predecessors.

First off: balance. In previous MK titles the impact of attack items were all normalized, and all pretty substantial. If you got drilled by a red shell, that’s it, you’re out for a set period. That worked when you had 12 players worth of items flying around, but with 24 the item frequency is just way too high and it had to be tweaked. Accordingly, items are pretty much nerfed across the board, and it seems like in some cases their specific impact might be different based on your weight class, so instead of completely spinning out, taking a shell might only cause you to somersault and lose control. It keeps your momentum way up. Sure, you’ll still get completely hosed momentum-wise when somebody decides their triple-red-shells have your name on them while you’re jumping over a pit, but even then it feels like you recover faster than MK8.

Second big side-effect: Grand Prix is now no longer a simple 4 tracks, 3(ish) laps per track. Instead a cup is now a race across the map. The first track is a traditional 3 laps, but between each subsequent track they spend effectively two laps worth of time and distance taking the highway to the next track, then one lap around that track.

The routes in-between maps are Fine but I feel they’re the worst part of the game. This change sort of makes the vast majority of tracks in the game feel like the oddball “linear” tracks like Mount Wario, and it makes learning the tracks really hard, which is made even more challenging by how dense and complex all these tracks are. It means so often I’ll be truckin’ along through the “road” portions, and then once I reach the actual Track I’ll take one corner poorly or beef a jump or totally fail in reading how a shortcut works, and whoops there’s no opportunity to get a hang for how to do it right on the next lap because there is no next lap.

The thing I’ve really struggled with and gone back and forth about how I feel about is the change in difficulty. Nintendo shuffled around so many aspects of the fundamentals in this game that makes it incredibly hard to tell if it’s more simple or more complex, if it’s easier to play or harder, if they’ve raised or lowered the skill ceiling.

Take movement, for instance. Movement in World feels very weird coming from MK8 Deluxe. With so much of Grand Prix now dedicated to driving between tracks, you’re spending a ton of time driving in effectively a straight line, and Nintendo have seemingly nerfed all ways to go fast in a straight line. Snaking, mini-turbo chaining, even coins are less effective to the point of being largely irrelevant. But to offset that, they introduced rail grinding, and put rails everywhere. Rails give you a slight speed boost, act as something you can constantly trick off of for mini-turbos, and you get a beefy turbo when you dismount a rail.

Rails are also frequently used for indicating a shortcut. The MK Series has always been big on shortcuts, some intended, many unintended. World has an unheard-of level of intended alternative routes. You can grind on nearly every railing, or anything that vaguely looks like a railing, and often times these will wind around and lead you to a completely separate path on the track. Sure, it has the standard kind of “ok the track splits left and right here but they loop around and meet shortly”, but more often than not it’ll introduce this whole extra level of verticality to tracks, where a track may split left and right but also simultaneously split up/down, or in like 5 different directions like Yoshi Valley. It feels like most tracks are like this, and that’s crazy and it rules.

So basic driving is simplified, but what you can do with driving is vastly vastly vastly more complicated. Does that net out to be easier or harder? I have no idea. It may be unknowable. Similar changes have been made with Racers and Karts. MK8 had four sources of stats: Racer, Kart, Wheels, Glider, and that introduced so much complexity that it required extensive scientific analysis to determine what the “optimal” loadout was. Now it’s back to just Racer + Kart. That feels like a reduction in complexity, but now there’s so much other stuff going on that stats feel less impactful, the focus feels like it has shifted from base stats to just solid driving, overall track knowledge, and tactical item usage.

So with regards to simplification vs complication, easy vs hard, raised vs lowered skill ceiling, the conclusion I’ve come to is that it just doesn’t matter. The real shift is moving away from stat-nerd obsessing over spreadsheets, and more towards stuff you’re directly seeing in the game, and it’s great. It does feel less “technical” than MK8D and less “tight”, but it’s still fun. And if you want a tight technical game go play MK8D. World did not delete MK8D from your Switch 2, it’s probably right there, go play it, it looks even better now and loads faster, too!

On to Multiplayer. Multiplayer is Chaos, to the point that it feels less like something you could consider a “serious” racing game that also has power-ups, and instead feels like a straight up party game where everybody is going to swing back and forth all over the rankings over the course of the race, and skill has minimal bearing on the overall outcome. When you’re in the middle of the pack and you hit the power-up blocks the game turns into a full-on mosh-pit with everybody slamming into each-other, shells flying all over the place, explosions, coins falling out everywhere, etc. But this is sorta OK? It’s no longer trying to be “serious”, online MP is drop-in/drop-out per-race. Lobbies form up, pick a track, race there, and you get +/- Elo immediately, you don’t have to do a “full” cup. So it’s Fine, you just invest however much time you want.

Though I’ve spent the least amount of time in it, the game’s open world is shockingly compelling. Unlike all previous MK titles the tracks in World are all physically placed on one contiguous open-world map. It isn’t like Forza Horizon, you can’t start a race directly from the open world, but it’s definitely interesting and they’ve crammed it full of neat little challenges and secrets and a lot of them are actually challenging, often exhibiting a level of difficulty I don’t typically expect from Nintendo. They also use it for the Multiplayer lobby, so you can screw around in an actual game instead of staring at some Miis milling about while spamming “I’m using Tilt Controls!!!”

In summary, the game is weird and great and different. Some aspects feel like a chaotic mess, but it’s an endearing and very pretty chaotic mess and plays great. And if you don’t like it, go play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.