Going by the sales, it seems pretty much mandatory for anyone with a Nintendo Switch 2 to also buy Mario Kart World, where the bundle must have been super popular. Anyway, this was my game for the holiday season, where I've begun playing this after Metroid Prime 4.
And my first impressions weren't all that great. It already starts with the controls, which took away some options you had in Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe). You used to be able to accelerate with Y and steer with the D-pad, but not any longer. I personally preferred holding the Y button, because it sits more comfortably on the Pro Controller for my large hands and it makes it easier to hit the brakes on B whenever you have to. There was even one time where I was getting cramps from holding down A for so long. Yeah, I could use the auto accelerate, but I would be playing Kirby Air Riders instead if I truly wanted that.
You also don't need the precision of the analog stick, because you only need to press left or right, so the D-pad always felt more suited for the job. But I had to readjust, because the game isn't giving you any options here...
Well, the Y button is now used for the map in Free Roam mode (and only there), while pressing down on the D-pad lets you rewind, which is probably how these changes came to be. But I would have preferred the L and R buttons for these actions, or some options to swap things. Let me decided whether I want to use the analog stick or the D-pad, simply enough.
And then there is the new scale of things: 24 racers, big roads, lots of going straight from one course to the other... It made me immediately want to have 200cc, because everything felt so slow at first. But sadly this mode doesn't exist yet.
However, when my niece and nephew came to visit for Christmas and I let them play for an hour, this gave me a different perspective. They thought that 100cc was way too fast and they were doing best on these long, straight intermissions, where you don't have to drift around tight corners. And since Mario Kart always has been a hit with kids, I can see why Nintendo was okay with this new direction.
At the same time they also gave the more serious Mario Kart players a lot more to master with all those new tricks, especially with the wall riding. I found that a bit unintuitive, to be honest, because the direction is entirely dependent on the angle you hit the wall with. You can't steer while wall riding, even though it feels like you should be able to. There is a lot of trial and error, potentially giving players an edge who have been practicing all those tricks and angles to perfection.
That's also true for many of the P-Switch missions in the Free Roam mode. Often I feel like the game is asking of a level of precision that it doesn't offer, usually when you have to hit rails or zip lines just right after a jump. Then I rewind, try to steer more, and fly past it anyway... In those situations I think their "snapping zones" should be larger, but this would probably be annoying in other scenarios.
Anyway, besides some of the trickier missions, I found the Free Roam to be quite enjoyable. It's perfect for in-between, for when you want to play a little bit. The must fun part are probably the ?-Panels, where there are five to discover per course. They really make you explore all around the race track and learn its hidden intricacies, maybe even more so than in Time Trials.
However, they also make me feel like an idiot after playing Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In the open world Zelda games it is mainly about spotting things and not a question of how to get there. You can always climb there, or fly up with your hover bike. In Mario Kart World you may spot a ?-Panel or a Peach Medaillon somewhere atop a house or on a pillar, but you can't just go up there directly. You have to find a way, which requires you to truly study the environments all around you, where you should not underestimate how complex some of those race tracks are. It can even get annoying, because you have to take huge detours to get where you want to be.
Things can get even worse should you happen to go out of bounds, because Lakitu is a tyrant in this game. He won't place you where you had been before your accident, no, he will place in one of few fixed spots around the race track, where then you have to backtrack all around the course just to try a second time. This got me quite frustrated around Crown City, one of the largest areas in the game, because it's two courses in one.
Sadly, you don't have any sense of completion for the P-Switches and Peach Medaillons. And all you ever get for your efforts are stickers, which you can use to customize your vehicle and avatar. To be fair, every single sticker is unique, so there is a stronger incentive to collect them all, as opposed to 900 pieces of golden poop. But they aren't even visible on some of the vehicles, so it's not all that exciting overall...
What's exciting is unlocking new outfits for the drivers, but this was done in the dullest way possible with the food. Whenever I saw a Yoshi's with something new, I swapped through all characters in the game who still had missing costumes to see if this did something... It's certainly not the intended way, but if you don't swap characters all that often, but want to have everything unlocked anyway, then this will be the most efficient method. And I was relieved when it was finally over... At least for now, there is a lot more left from Mario Kart Tour what they could bring over as DLC.
Oh, and the character selection menu is atrocious. I understand that they wanted to offer a selection based on themes, e.g. desert or snow, but it really would have been better if you could select the character first and then the costume. The way it is it's bloated, pretending that there are many more drivers than there actually are.
It's the other way around with the race courses, where there is more to discover than there is on first glance. Some of them do offer different variants, e.g. driving them in reverse, which can be played by selecting the right routes in VS mode. This is really cool, but there could have been more options here, like driving some courses in reverse for three whole laps.
And it was a nice surprise to find a number of SNES course tributes as intermissions on the world. There is like seven of these, which includes all three Ghost Valleys for some reason... But again, they could have done more with them, like offering them as courses in the underwhelming Battle Mode.
As for the new Grand Prix mode and the Knockout Tour, both heavily favor front-running, because for the most part you will be treading new grounds and therefore don't have to worry about bananas. The set rivals in Grand Prix feel super unfair, however, where they are clearly rubber-banding and getting support of the other CPU competitors. To get three stars on everything I had to fight them with their own methods, meaning that my partner helped me by covering my back.
Luckily, clearing a cup or rally in Mirror Mode now also gives you the stars in 150cc and lower, so you only have to do it once. In Mario Kart 8 150cc, Mirror Mode and 200cc had to be cleared separately. But there is also nothing to get here for the three stars, not even a sticker, so you really just do it for everything to look nice.
I personally found completing the Knockout Tour a bit easier, because you can gain a significant lead and just run with it. The first section is usually the trickiest, but at least you fail early and not in the third lap of the fourth race. The Knockout Tour is also a fantastic standout in this game, which makes good use of the open world setting to deliver something new for the series.
As someone who grew up with the Game Boy, I was delighted to finally see and hear some stuff from the Super Mario Land trilogy in Mario Kart World. The game has a rich soundtrack, where it randomly plays tracks during the intermissions and Free Roam, which covers a lot from all previous Mario Kart games, as well as other Super Mario games, like the Game Boy classics. It truly is a loveletter to the whole Super Mario franchise, and I was super excited when I first heard that Wario Land tune. Oh, and the Batadon and Tokotoko statues from the third world in Super Mario Land make their first reappearance, which was unexpected.
So... while my first impression wasn't the best, I really grew to like the game over the last weeks. Right now I'm hoping that it will get some awesome DLC in 2026, including a comeback of the crossovers. I want my Master Cycle Zero back! Vi-O-La would be cool as well, even though it was one of the more questionable aspects about Metroid Prime 4.
