Mario Kart World is an incredibly clean game. As the latest iteration of a decades-spanning franchise, it has been winnowed into something smoothly efficient and entirely absent of blemishes. The series’ hypercolored, candy-coated art style is rendered with impressive clarity on the Nintendo Switch 2’s brand-new hardware. You can launch into a race in moments, whether playing on your own, sharing a split screen or playing online.
In this well-crafted experience, there is very little standing in the way of the fun. Yet once I eventually put down the racing controller, I can only assume this iteration will be as thoroughly erased from my memory as Mario Kart 8 was after its release 11 years ago.
It comes down to the nature of playing these games. They aren’t linear narrative experiences. They aren’t designed to provoke specific emotions at specific times, nor to generate thought or reflections on a theme.
The Mario Kart games are toys, things to pick up and play, to boop and to beep, before putting them back down again. The karts and drivers you can select are collectibles to rotate around and admire, not embody. They’re like video game versions of Parcheesi. They don’t come bearing rich characters, plots or motivations, all useful tools when it comes to creating something that can memorably exist on its own as a piece of art.
When Mario Kart 8 came out for the Wii U in 2014, the most active discourse about it online focused on Luigi. More specifically, the evil way he seems to smirk at other racers while caught on the replay camera that rolls after a race. We couldn’t get enough of the anodyne plumber shooting murderous looks at his competitors. But Luigi wasn’t designed to be a giant jerk. His demeanor was an accident of his default facial expression paired with players’ desire for meaning and humor in a game without much consideration for either.
Since the release of Mario Kart World, I’ve already seen popular social media posts with a picture of a smiling Toad driving a police car, instigating questions of whether anti-cop slogans apply to this gormless talking mushroom. All of these memes work as a kind of fan fiction for Mario Kart, adding a layer of narrative.
Most of the racers in Mario Kart World are series regulars who carry decades of back story from previous games, movies and comic-book spinoffs. It’s easy to project pathos onto the cartoonish frames of Wario or Yoshi or Donkey Kong. We get hints of character, too, in the way that racers side-eye one another while waiting in the starting line, or in the shape of Waluigi’s lanky form as he wraps himself around a tiny scooter.
There’s a sense of humor implicit in certain character choices, too: a flying, limbless Para-Biddybud behind the wheel of a go-kart, or the cows and moles who normally serve as course obstacles. These tiny details form an impressionistic pattern over time, reminiscent of the ghostly indentations a pen’s tip leaves on the opposite side of a page.
They wind up feeling superfluous to what the game actually is, though: a kart racer on tracks inspired by various Nintendo properties. It is a racing series that marches in lock step with a long legacy, to the extent that I can’t say with any confidence that completing a race on the Switch 2 feels substantially different from playing the original Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo.
There are many more bells and whistles in Mario Kart World, of course, with lots of floors added onto the original game’s blueprint.
It comes packed with new vehicles, new characters and new tracks (as well as variations of classic ones). There are dynamic new ways of moving, such as rails you can hop onto and grind along, Tony Hawk-style, before somersaulting back onto the track. Racers are now able to flip themselves into the air, leaping over their competitors, obstacles and — with enough timing and practice — even red shells. There’s an exciting new mode, Knockout Tour, an endurance race that combines several tracks into one long one and eliminates drivers after each checkpoint. It benefits particularly well from the chaos and fun of bringing online players into the mix.
There’s also the game’s much-touted Free Roam mode, which allows you to pick any character and drive around an open-world map, passing through existing tracks, discovering different collectibles and accomplishing location-specific challenges that test your skill and accuracy. Though a promising addition, this mode can’t compete with the robustness of Forza Horizon or hold a candle to Burnout Paradise, the originator of this open-world approach. Both games make the concept central to their structure, so they naturally fill them with variety. Here, the Free Roam mode sits at the bottom of the game’s main menu, wedged between its collectible sticker book and user manual.
Like the rest of the game, this mode is elegant, but mostly empty of anything terribly meaningful. The roads and freeways are lined with outfit-transforming fast food, Bob-omb-driven cars, Hammer-throwing Bros and colorful rides that produce no exhaust, drip no oil and leave no skid marks. The boulevards crisscrossing this pristine landscape are congestion-free and quiet. Mario Kart World’s surface is entirely smooth, free of any bumps or indentations. Slipping off it feels inevitable.
Mario Kart World is available on the Switch 2.
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