Four hours with Mario Kart World barely scratched the surface

Your mileage may vary, but after spending half a day playing with Mario Kart World’s various modes across dozens of new and reimagined race tracks, the headline-grabbing price tag for Nintendo’s Switch 2 flagship launch title is starting to feel earned. 

During an all-day hands-on event with Switch 2 in New York City last week, I spent four hours with the game and still barely scratched the surface of the kart-racing game’s depths; in fact, I only lightly touched Mario Kart World’s all-important Free Roam mode, where hundreds of collectibles and missions await. Everything I did play whetted my appetite for the open-world evolution of Mario Kart.

A good chunk of my time with Mario Kart World was spent playing through the game’s various Grand Prix courses, competing against 23 computer-controlled opponents. Starting with a fresh save file, I wound up unlocking a handful of characters — Donkey Kong, Daisy, Rosalina, Lakitu, and Cataquack — by winning cups or through one of Mario Kart World’s new items. In some races, the magical koopa Kamek would inflict his wizard’s curse on my character, temporarily transforming my guy Toad into one of the game’s other characters — like, say, a Cataquack from Super Mario Sunshine.

But thanks to Kamek’s trickery, I then got access to Cataquack as a racer, one of the many new “NPC” racers that push Mario Kart World’s playable roster to more than 150 characters.

That said, many of those racers are familiar faces like Mario, Peach, and Bowser wearing new outfits. (My personal favorite is a Toad with a hamburger head.) Those costume-variant characters are easily unlocked by grabbing a new item called Dash Food, which looks like a smiling golden bagged lunch, and consuming this photorealistic grub while racing. While many of Mario Kart World’s sleek costume variants carry over from Nintendo’s mobile Mario Kart game, Mario Kart Tour, there are plenty of fun new looks for guys like Wario, Bowser Jr., and Daisy as well.

In addition to dozens of unlockable characters that can be earned by playing Grand Prix, I also wound up unlocking a handful of new vehicles for my livery. All that’s required is to pick up coins on race tracks — which, of course, confer an increase in your kart’s speed, so you’ll want to grab them anyway.

Playing Mario Kart World felt immediately familiar and comfortable; as I raced around the game’s new tracks, I relearned how to drift and acquire boosts. But of course, in World,  there are also a few new techniques to learn.

For example, I learned a new technique that offers alternate ways to boost, and the ability to drive on rails and walls, new raceable surfaces in World. Anyone who’s played a Mario Kart game over the past decade knows that carefully drifting around corners is a great way to build up speed, but even in straightaways, you can generate short bursts of speed. Drifting around corners requires a quick press of the R button, and while holding it down, carefully shifting your driver left and right, unleashing a speed boost as you exit a curve. Getting a speed boost while driving straight also requires a press of R, then unleashing it at the right time. But in Mario Kart World, in addition to a speed boost, your racer can also do a trick jump, flipping left, right, forward, or backward. This new straightaway-boost technique can be useful for hopping onto grind rails (where further boosts await) or over obstacles (like banana peels). You can also just stunt on your opponents, adding a little flair to races.

Mario Kart World’s new boost technique will offer racers advanced new strategies, and appears to reduce the reliance on “snaking,” a drifting technique that requires weaving back and forth on a straightaway to build up speed. It also adds more for players to manage while racing; I needed to constantly be thinking about how to maximize my boosts during long straight stretches of tracks and around corners. In other words, I felt “always on” during every Mario Kart World race. 

There are other speed boost considerations in Mario Kart World. Dash Food also gives players a speed boost, and there’s a new item called the Coin Shell that when thrown leaves behind a trail of golden coins. You’ll be jockeying for position to grab these coins — not easy! — to get the speed boost that the golden tokens give you during a race.

Beyond Grand Prix, I played a dozen or so competitive matches, battling against other players locally in a LAN-style setting in VS Races, Knockout Tour, and in Battle modes Coin Runners and Balloon Battle.

Knockout Tour is new to the Mario Kart series, and functions something like a battle royale mode. Players race over consecutive tracks across the game’s open-world map, and at certain checkpoints, they’ll be eliminated if they’re in the last four places. That makes the stakes higher and higher each leg of the race, and can amplify some of the frustration of a game of Mario Kart World. During a Knockout Tour race, it was not uncommon for another player to knock me into a disqualifying position by using an item, and to find myself knocked from a top-10 spot to being quickly eliminated. Such is Mario Kart, though, a series known for its Blue Shell-powered humiliations. 

Coin Runners — a classic mode in which players fight to acquire the biggest stack of coins in an arena-style course — and Balloon Battle — another familiar mode in which players try to pop each other’s balloons — offer similar amounts of pain and pleasure. Despite not typically being a fan of Mario Kart’s Battle modes, I had a great time losing every time we played the non-racing modes in World. 

One of my most enjoyable bouts of Mario Kart World, though, involved playing the game in split-screen competitive mode while using the Switch 2’s camera. Paired with two other members of the media, we played together on a couch, with each of our faces projected on screen, captured by Nintendo’s new camera. Putting an actual human face onscreen, and seeing their portraits get rocked and rattled when smacked with a Red Shell or zapped by a lightning bolt really added to the competitive spirit of Mario Kart World. (Performance during split-screen couch-competitive was admittedly pretty chunky, but still a great way to play.)

It wasn’t until after I’d played hours worth of competitive Mario Kart World that I decided to finally dive into the game’s Free Roam mode, which is easily accessible from the main menu by pressing the Joy-Con plus button. I had access to what appeared to be a nearly complete save file, with a ridiculous number of racers, dozens of vehicles, and a massive world map with hundreds of destinations. That included hundreds of P Switches to find, each with associated missions to undertake, and hundreds of ? Panels and Peach Medallions to collect. I tooled around for only a little bit in Free Roam, somewhat overwhelmed by the vastness of the space and admittedly a little tired from playing Mario Kart competitive half of the day.

Suffice it to say, the sheer number of things to explore, find, and unlock in Mario Kart World is staggering. Even if competitive local or online multiplayer isn’t the draw, solo players will have many, many hours’ worth of content to explore when Mario Kart World launches on Switch 2 later this week.

It’s been more than a decade since the previous all-new Mario Kart game for consoles, and World is already shaping up to not only be a worthwhile successor to the Wii U and Switch entries, but an important evolution for Nintendo’s bestselling series. I’m just sitting here at the starting line, ready to get racing.