Mario Kart 8 — especially in its 68-million-selling Deluxe form on Nintendo Switch — is the definitive Mario Kart, and perhaps it always will be. It has the crispness and technicality of 1992’s Super; the rollicking, combative multiplayer of 64; the accessibility and gloss of Mario Kart Wii. Refined and expanded over 10 years, it includes many of the series’ greatest tracks, too. It is the fifth-best-selling game of all time. Nintendo could have been forgiven for just extending it on to the Switch 2 and making it a forever game.
Instead, the Mario Kart team has attempted to follow the unfollowable with a sort of soft reboot. Mario Kart World asks: What if this scrambled carnival of cartoon imagery and looping race tracks was actually a place? The series’ ninth installment is an open-world racing game, where all the action happens on a single, contiguous map, and tracks flow into each other. This is not a new genre, and it has its fair share of classics already: Test Drive Unlimited, 2005’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Burnout Paradise, and most notably, the Forza Horizon series, which these days is the only racing game franchise that can remotely challenge Mario Kart’s mass-market hegemony.
But Mario Kart is not like other racing games (setting aside its legion of imitators). It has a different form and different priorities, which means Nintendo’s first attempt to hammer its anarchic kart-racing peg into the open-world hole isn’t an unqualified success. The good news is that Nintendo has not lost its focus on what makes Mario Kart great — not for a second. At the absolute worst, Mario Kart World is a superb Mario Kart game with an interesting gimmick and a new, chill solo playstyle.
In the game’s reveal trailer and deep-dive Direct, Nintendo oversold how central exploring the world of Mario Kart would be. It’s a surprise to boot up Mario Kart World and find the much-discussed new Free Roam exploration mode left out of the familiar suite of main menu options: solo, multiplayer, and online; Grand Prix, Battle, and Time Trial. Instead, you press the plus button, the menus melt away, and you segue smoothly into the world, a lone karter in a vast, empty racing playground. This is how Mario Kart World relates to its map: It’s inherent, but siloed.
You can’t play Free Roam in split-screen, the way most people enjoy Mario Kart. You can’t fully experience it online, either. You don’t discover and unlock Mario Kart World’s racing action by exploring its map the way you do in Forza Horizon. To race, you do as you have always done: pick a Grand Prix cup — Mushroom, Leaf, Star, Lightning — or jump into an online lobby and hurtle from one chaotic, shell-slinging competition into the next.
But the races aren’t a series of antic non-sequiturs anymore. They do lead into each other. Typically, a Grand Prix cup starts with a traditional three-lap circuit race, but the next three events are cross-country point-to-point stages topped off with a single lap of the destination stadium. Mario Kart’s tight racing circuits and vertiginous theme-park rides are now interspersed — no, integrated – with bustling blasts down highways, along rivers, across wildernesses, and up dazzling escalators of boost pads and sky rings. In Mario Kart World, you’re always going somewhere.
It’s epic, and a different style of racing from what we’re used to. It’s also strongly favored in both the Grand Prix and online racing, perhaps to a fault — a little more traditional three-lap circuit racing would round out Mario Kart World’s diet, considering the layouts to support it are in the game. Some Mario Kart purists are chafing against the point-to-point races they call “intermission tracks,” bemoaning the long straightways and random hazards that compress the field and take the emphasis off pure driving skill. But in these sections, Nintendo has simply put the demand for technique elsewhere.
Mario Kart World significantly expands the series’ driving vocabulary. New moves elaborate on the already dense system of speed boosts that are just as vital to success as iconic pickups like the Red Shell or the Banana. You can now hold R when driving in a straight line to charge up a jump, which can be used to trigger wall riding and rail riding, both of which offer huge boosting opportunities. And Mario Kart World’s designers have seeded opportunities to use these everywhere. You can even wall ride on the sides of trucks and buses.
The potential for showy stunt combos and sick tech is immense, and the community will be exploring the possibilities for a long time yet. But even more casual drivers will be constantly engaged, picking out their next opportunity to squeeze out some more speed from dozens of options. It also feels as though combat items like shells have been nerfed a little, while the mushroom boosts are buffed. In Mario Kart World, there’s one rule: Always Be Boosting.
It’s deeply rewarding technical racing that, in true Mario Kart style, can be relied on to win out over cruel luck and chaos nine times out of ten — well, maybe four times out of five. That holds true even in Mario Kart World’s swarming field of 24 racers, but is tested to the limit by the new Knockout Tours. These are long, battle royale-style endurance races that cross the map, knocking out the last four racers at a series of checkpoints. They can frustrate, but they bring a level of visceral tension that classic racing can sometimes lack — especially in the brutal but brilliant online lobbies.
World is an expansive new Mario Kart, broader and subtly deeper than it was before — and, as befits the $80 marquee Switch 2 launch title and sequel to one of the biggest games of all time, it’s a lavish production, built on flawless tech. I’ve never seen it drop from 60 frames per second in any mode or circumstance. It’s gorgeous, full of tactile textures and toothsome, colorful environments, but always foregrounding the adorable and hilarious character art. The dozens of unlockable costumes, vehicles, and “NPC” characters — Cow, Pokey, Cheep Cheep, Coin Coffer, and co. — are drawn and animated with infectious humor and exquisite detail. It’s a delight simply to browse them.
The musical score trumps even Mario Kart 8’s all-time classic. It’s a scarcely believable luxury: hours and hours of banging new tracks and classic Mario themes in a range of styles that runs from nocturnal elevator music through spring break EDM to groovy samba and, of course, shredding jazz-funk, most of it recorded live by God’s own session band. It’s Koji Kondo by way of Quincy Jones, and the day it drops on the Nintendo Music app should be a public holiday.
Amid all this opulence, Nintendo remains committed to streamlined minimalism in Mario Kart’s structure and interface. It’s a firm choice, and probably the right one, as it keeps the series accessible to its immensely broad audience. But in a game of this scale, it can create friction as well as eliminate it. The Mario Kart community will be unsurprised but a little deflated by the basic online amenities; it shouldn’t be this hard to play ranked modes with a friend in the year 2025. At least the network performance is good.
But the biggest challenge Nintendo has faced is in integrating the deep familiarity and simplicity of Mario Kart with the scope of an open world. It results in a lot of compromises. Because you move through the game by ticking off Grands Prix from the menu in time-honored fashion, rather than through progressive exploration of the map, and because Nintendo includes next to no mapping information in the UI, the world Nintendo’s artists have built never becomes a lived-in space you feel you know and can navigate from memory, the way the greatest video game worlds do.
The “world” of Mario Kart World is a triumph of design — it’s effectively one giant fantasy race track that’s never not fun to drive, in any direction, and it’s somehow crammed with secrets and off-piste challenges as well as multifarious strategic opportunities for racing. It’s just not really a place. I can’t imagine building an emotional relationship with it the way I have with Azeroth, or Hyrule, or, more to the point, Forza Horizon 4’s Britain.
What’s more, Nintendo has determined that all Mario Kart World’s unlocks — those juicy costumes and vehicles — must be accessible through any play mode by collecting the ubiquitous coins and eating the only mildly scarcer Dash Food drive-thru meal items (which all look delicious, by the way). This means there’s no distinct reward for finding collectables or mastering the P Switch challenges in Free Roam, other than hundreds of nicely designed but meaningless stickers.
Free Roam is the freshest thing in Mario Kart World; it’s a shame that Nintendo seems so scared of it. As a much more chill way to enjoy Mario Kart solo, it’s deeply welcome. It’s also genuinely novel, serving up something more akin to a vehicular Mario platformer than to your typical open-world driving game. I love the brisk P Switch missions, which drop evasive gauntlets, mini time trials, coin collection sprints, rail-grinding trick challenges, soaring aerial routes, and more all over the map.
But Free Roam is a little too unstructured and far too cut off from the rest of the game. You can encounter other characters driving around, but you can’t challenge them to a sprint (or interact with them at all); you can visit a circuit, but you can’t trigger a race from there. You can’t really experience it with other players except as a glorified lobby screen in online multiplayer, and this version of the map has the P Switch missions removed. It feels empty and aimless.
I love Free Roam, and I think Mario Kart World’s map is a marvel. I just wish it could have been integrated at a deeper level with the other game modes in a way that would breathe life into this extraordinary location. And I do think that could have been done without swamping the game in the bloat and complication that bedevils so many open-world games, Forza Horizon included. It’s possible that Nintendo will build up this side of Mario Kart World over time or in a sequel; if Mario Kart 8 Deluxe felt like an endpoint for everything Mario Kart had been, World is a great starting point for its future.
But if I had gotten the open-world Mario Kart I think I want, perhaps something more important would have been lost. Maybe Nintendo had the right idea: Why drive to the next race when the drive there can be the race? Why make the distance between players and this joyous game any more than a single, swift, satisfying button-click? That’s classic Mario Kart, and Mario Kart World is nothing if not a classic Mario Kart game. If the integrity and scope of its open-world ambition have to be sacrificed to stay true to the Mario Kart creed, then it’s a price worth paying.
