It’s with heavy heart that I note the recently released Switch 2’s Mario Kart World just feels too big to be experienced on the portable screen. Admittedly, I found the Switch 1’s portability lacking a bit, especially when I rode public transportation, but it was nice for waiting rooms, standing in lines for events, traveling, that sort of stuff. I’ve played the now defunct mobile game Mario Kart Tour, which was fun but horribly over-monetized, so I had hoped MKW would bring back some portable fun. But unfortunately, it’s limited.
And yet, it’s also great. Massively on the Go is primarily about playing on the go, so while we’ll talk about some of the mobile shortcomings of the game, among other areas it could improve, the overall game certainly feels like a worthy step-up from the previous titles – if you can afford the entry price.
New console, new world
Let’s start with some bare basics of the new console: The Switch 2 is a bit bigger than the Switch 1. Again, I know a few folks who agreed that the Switch 1 can be little tough for on-the-go play in some ways. You couldn’t just pull it out in the grocery store, and the gyroscopic controls for some games in handheld mode made it wholly inappropriate for playing in close-quarter public spaces, like the bus. All of those issues continue for the Switch 2 as a whole, but Mario Kart World has some issues that, for me, are wholly new to the series – namely, the world’s just too big for the small screen.
I’ll get to this a bit later, but Mario Kart World is a whole lot bigger than past entries, at least in many of the racing modes, which aren’t self-contained. I’m not usually a graphics guy, so I don’t know how good the quality is for the people who are super into them, but the presentation and technique are movie-quality. There’s a big emphasis on set pieces and setting up their anticipation, and while it works on the small screen, at least for me at my age, I know I miss that stuff on smaller screens, so it doesn’t hit the same.
I had some breathtaking experiences in Mario Kart 8: Deluxe, but MKW blows a lot of those out of the water, so while you can play MKW via the portable aspect of the system (preferably in the break room, library, or other area you have plenty of space), it just feels like there’s not enough screen to properly process everything.
Here’s an example: Even though the game is more open world than past titles, it’s not fully open, especially during races. There are boundaries where you’ll get forceably hauled back to course if you’re not careful, and especially on the small screen, I couldn’t always tell where the course ended and the boundaries began. This does break some immersion, and I’m sure it’s also to prevent massively cutting through courses ala Mario Kart 64, but that should be permissible at least in one mode, if not the base game.
The other issue is that the biggest addition to the game in terms of mobility isn’t the open world but rather Knockout Tour, a kind of survival racing. Nintendo’s been doing more survival stuff lately, like its 99 games (Tetris 99 and F-Zero 99), but those are smaller-scale and lighter on graphics. F-Zero 99 is certainly closer to what Knockout Tour is, but at least for me, it’s more upsetting when I disconnect, perhaps due to the game feeling larger and having 24 racers instead of 99, making it a bit more personable. The game also tracks your stats against friends who were in the same race, which is nice, but not when the losses are due to disconnects.
Online mobile play is Nintendo-average but overall mediocre. As with many console-focused companies, disconnects don’t give you a way to rejoin your match, so if you DC mid race, you’re just SOL. Similarly, you can’t easily drop in-and-out when trying to play with friends. Yes, you can join the basic race mode, but the most interesting stuff, like Knockout Tour and for some reason Battle Mode, just won’t allow it. You also have no way of doing a full Roam multiplayer, as the P-Blocks challenges (which award more tickets) are available only offline and solo.
You’ve got to set up a whole room for multiplayer with friends if you want to do Knockout Tour, so even if you’re both playing at the same time, you’re going to have to jump into (voice) chat if you actually want to play together, and that should have ended on the Switch. Heck, if I could just do free roam mode and allow others to join me – that’d be great, but I can’t. I’m hoping later titles will get with the times, but for now, it’s another generation of at-least-they’re-trying-online, which at this point, very much feels a few generations behind. Nintendo is good at innovating designs, but online experiences are still lagging behind the rest of the industry.
One thing I am liking so far, though, is the improvements to the Switch app, even though they’re not MKW exclusive. Since Nintendo’s cut ties with Twitter, I’ve had to go through different hoops to claim the precious pics I post here for post-release games, and it’s always been a clumsy, multi-stop process. The new system via the Switch app is obviously one step longer than directly posting to Twitter, but I can just as easily send pictures to Discord or Instagram if I’d like.
The other nice thing is that you can use the app to notify you when certain friends log in. I haven’t found an option to turn this off for myself, so if you want privacy, you’ll have to completely turn off your online status or switch to Best Friends only, but for those who share their status, it’s been easier to ping them about play times.
With all the issues, I should note that you can play the game mobiley. Auto-steering and correction are options, with the latter on by default. This is important because in some ways, every course is kind of a mix Toad’s Turnpike, Ghost Valley, and Dino Jungle. I’ll go into this later, but essentially, MOBs (as opposed to NPC racers) and breaking guardrails are the norm, not the exception as we see in most titles. They are different in MKW and actually sometimes beneficial, but in terms of mobile play, especially for those of us who may squint on smaller screens, understanding that these are now common things to look out for make or break the portable experience.
Finally, there’s the rewind feature, which I don’t think is being discussed enough. Admittedly, for online multiplayer, you basically can’t use this but you can use it on the roaming lobby map between matches. For example, if you find a Peach Coin (which award sticker customizations), you have to reach by jumping from one grinding rail to another, and you mess up, simply hit down on the D-Pad (several times even, if you like) to retry the jump. I’ve gotten several stickers this way while waiting for the next match, and it’s pretty satisfying. Again, it’s a shame it’s not available online, as getting item boxes can really make or break your results and having the option to sacrifice a few seconds to avoid the crowd in a neat way is a lot more satisfying than making a u-turn or driving in reverse, but that’s the way it is.
Size accommodations
As I said, the game feels easier to appreciate on a big screen. Above, you can see the upcoming classic Donkey-Kong inspired course. This comes after driving through roads and hills, seeing it even further in the distance. You know it’s coming up, and it builds a tension of a greater magnitude compared to the few other times you may experience it in other Mario Kart titles, which often just do this with a mountain you ascend.
The roads are quite wide to accommodate up to 24-players at the same time, so the world does feel generously large. There are areas where it feels like any direction could be the right direction though, and the game simply isn’t that open. You’ll be pushed to turn around or even just dragged back to the course by Lakitu. Again, despite this being MK World, I’d argue Mario Kart 64, with its massive shortcuts and crazy physics (the latter of which World does have a bit of), was more open in terms of self-contained tracks.
However, MKW still feels more massive in total, as there are still tons of off-road paths you can take shortcuts for, especially if boosting (which sometimes carry you through traditional no-man’s lands) or breaking through barriers hiding said secrets. It still would be nice if I could more easily focus on where the race is going if these boundaries are to be hidden, but at the same time, some of them appear in areas where it seemed like a normal three-mushroom cluster could have gotten me through, but instead the devs arbitrarily made it a no-man’s land.
That said, the wideness of the roads often allows new and varied NPC karts, and I don’t mean other racers. Those who remember Toad’s Turnpike and Dino Jungle may recall past tracks had other vehicles or wildlife on the road. This comes up more often, not just in single tracks, but on the road between tracks.
MOBs dropping items or providing ramps returns, but some items can help you unlock additional costumed characters (like food or the Kamek item), or maybe have an enemy NPC throwing Fireballs or coins at everyone behind them. Maybe there’s a moose or a t-rex on the road – or even a giant football player. There was a real danger of the game feeling big and empty, and while you may feel it for a split second every once in a while during races (it’s more of a battle mode issue to me), MKW feels appropriately busy during the races, though there’s a lot more happening on that front than even I expected.
Modes of play
Racing feels fairly standard to other Mario Kart games at first: drive, get items, hit people, lose/win at the last second. Car parts, which have been with the series since 2012’s Mario Kart 7, are gone, and that’s a bummer, but stickers at least help make the kart feel slightly different, as does the plethora of racers. Especially when you’re racing online, the higher racer count becomes noticeable, and not just because of the need of larger tracks.
While we’ve always had to fight for items, seeing 10-20 other players all aiming for various power ups at the same time really kicks things into a frenzy. Narrow paths for shortcuts become big battle zones. Crowded finish lines aren’t just 4-5 players, but in the heat of the moment, they’re uncountable, and you pray your invincibility will last long enough to blast through them and into the next Knockout round.
We’re not done with basic racing yet: What really kicks things up in terms of immersion is when you race at tracks from previous games and realize that they’re often just some of the laps, not all. You’re racing across the continent. Some laps include portions of the last race you ran plus nearby areas. It’s crazy when going from, say, the desert, through the swamp, and into the snow, not just through cutscenes and laps, but all through a singular drive.
You can really feel this when you go to the roaming modes, which online players will mostly experience as a kind of lobby. In some ways, this is Nintendo’s answer to more open-world racers, such as Ubisoft’s The Crew. You can find question mark panels and food to unlock stickers and different costumed characters, though aside from getting super lucky with Kamek unlockables, you’ll still need to play through single-player mode to get the most out of the game.
Roam modes vaguely remind me of exploring in old school MMOs, in that I keep wanting to abuse physics to get to places barely out of reach. For example, I kept trying to combine trick jumps with wall running (driving?) or just plain using the charge jump to get onto a tiny ledge, but it just doesn’t seem feasible, nor does simply driving at a corner and hoping I’ll clip onto a tiny particle to reset my jump for a double jump, as I’m sure many of us did in ’90s/early 2000s MMOs in addition to Mario Kart 64. No, most of the secrets in the roaming mode are carefully crafted into the experience rather than open puzzles you can tackle with fun, abusable bugs.
It should be noted that the specific Free Roam mode (offline, single player) is also the only mode where the “P-Switch” locations active. You won’t find them in races or even the lobbies. Even then, the world isn’t exactly full of them or even a lot of secrets. You just see lots of open terrain and occasionally missed opportunities, such as being awarded stickers for taking out certain NPCs with your kart, but not having that as an unlock method even when that character is on the roster.
Battle mode, as I feared, has been a major downgrade since MK8D. The old school battle-focused maps are great, but most of the rest are basically closed versions of race tracks, which was the problem in Mario Kart Wii and the original Mario Kart 8, the latter of which was greatly fixed with the deluxe version. Despite the game being more open-world oriented, these maps just feel like they were made for racing and not brawling. They don’t have the obvious built-in features like a central battle area, clumps of items, or even really the nice circular shape that makes it difficult to hide from a fight. And we’ve lost basically all Battle Mode options beyond Balloon Battle (balloons are lives to take/lose, but there’s also a game-ending timer and points to consider) and Coin Runner.
Coin Runner, where you just get as many coins as you can while losing the fewest to other players, has never been my favorite mode, but it’s forced on you online half the time. You get that or Balloon Battle randomly online. The latter is pretty fun, especially on the tracks that aren’t just closed-off races, but Coin Runner just feels like a chore, especially when paired with race-track maps that seem to encourage hiding far away from the action instead of engaging.
Suffice it to say, Mario Kart World certainly feels like something new in the series. Not since 2012’s Mario Kart 7 and its customizable kart parts (which MKW has dropped) has there been such a strong feeling of change. However, MKW also feels like it should have been released in 2017 in place of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. A lot of the design aspects would have been fresher back then. MKW feels like the answer to other open-world racers that, frankly, do it better but with more realistic driving.
Had it not been for good course design, we wouldn’t be talking about MK8D at all, but as this is the one MK game for the Switch, we should have gotten something better. Twice now, even. Again, Mario Kart World is sadly not great for dropping in and playing with friends hassle free as other games are. Heck, Animal Crossing: New Horizons handled online play better. And being unable to rejoin a match? I know that’s hard in Knockout Mode if your timing is bad, but the computer can’t just play as us for, say, a minute until we reconnect?
If you’re not a die-hard Mario Kart fan, it’s hard to justify getting the Switch 2 immediately just to play it. It is a solid game, and it’s been hinted that there’ll be at least one update later one. If MKW gets half the updates Mario Kart 8 Deluxe got we’ll be in a great place, especially if they add new rulesets and maps to the battle mode, improve the roaming mode and make it multiplayer, and allow for exploration to act as another option for unlocking characters largely trapped behind the Kamek item. For now though, it’s pretty safe to say that while it’s a better Kart game, I think Mario Kart World isn’t the title game that will get more than the biggest Nintendo fans to buy a Switch 2, especially if you’re looking for solid, online mobile play.
Massively OP’s Andrew Ross is an admitted Pokemon geek and expert ARG-watcher. Nobody knows Niantic and Nintendo like he does! His Massively on the Go column covers Pokemon Go as well as other mobile MMOs and augmented reality titles!
