You’d be forgiven for looking at Mario Kart World and its prominent Free Roam mode and thinking that it’s another entry in the growing list of open world Nintendo games focused on letting you play however you want. My impression is that someone high up at Nintendo probably told the Mario Kart team it was their turn to make one of those games, but they didn’t really want to and delivered this strange mix of ideas instead. This is a game where you technically could spend 100 hours in Free Roam driving around collecting coins and never racing at all, but it’s also a game that’s so prescriptive about how you play that it doesn’t even have a settings menu.
Let’s start with what MKW does well. It’s actually really good at being a traditional Mario Kart. There are 30 tracks that are mostly excellent and are almost entirely free of the visual confusion that plagued MK8’s later levels. There’s a great mix of setpieces, tight corners that encourage drifting, and even some elements that change on each lap. Several tracks even have neat callbacks to other games, like a sequence that approximates playing Donkey Kong inside an MK race.
Characters are another strong point. There’s a huge cast to unlock, and all of them have at least one alternate outfit to find. Vehicle customization has been entirely removed, which is unfortunate, but you get over 30 different pre-defined vehicles to choose from instead. Vehicles are unlocked every time you collect 100 coins, which is easy enough to do that you’ll end up with a good while of unlocking a new vehicle every time you finish a race.
Now, the bad news. Remember those excellent traditional tracks? The game doesn’t really want to let you race on them. You’ll get to race one fully and three for one lap if you do a grand prix, and you’ll maybe get to see a brief glimpse of them if you’re doing a knockout race. The rest of your time is spent on the roads between courses, which range in quality from mediocre to quite bad. Take a glance at the track map in the screenshot above. It’s basically a straight line. You might think that there’d at least be hazards or other interesting bits to make up for the remarkably uninspired layout, and there are, but the tracks have been made so wide to accommodate 24 racers that avoiding those hazards is almost always completely trivial. That’s also massively reduced the utility of some items – you’re not going to be hitting anyone with a Bob-omb or getting splash damage hits from Blue Shells when everyone has miles of lateral space to swerve into.
What’s most frustrating about the dreary highway courses is how much they conflict with the game you’d expect from the title and how long ago this problem was solved. Open world racing has been a thing since at least 2008’s Burnout Paradise, which you can play on Switch, yet it’s MKW that feels like the early incomplete version of that idea. There was tremendous opportunity here to let players race from one track to the next using whatever course they wanted, like in Burnout, but instead you’re forced on to walled off and largely linear highways. Or, it could have taken a page from Forza Horizon or Hot Wheels Unleashed and let you piece together your own cups or even tracks from what’s available in the world. But it doesn’t. There is a very good traditional Mario Kart hiding here, but you’re not allowed to play it in Grand Prix mode. It’s archaic as an open world game and deliberately hamstrung as an MK game.
I’ve hardly mentioned Free Roam so far because I didn’t find any reason to play it. I’m sure it will appeal to some players, but the lack of splitscreen and the extremely limited variety of discoverables will limit its appeal. There was a lot of opportunity here to hide vehicles, characters, crazy gameplay modes, or other interesting things in the world, but instead it’s just a bunch of short time trials and some hidden coins. You can technically find outfits in the world, but you can also easily get all of these from races. It also doesn’t really encourage exploring since the same respawning items unlock outfits for every character. You could drive around looking for a new food source for each one, but you could also just sit there and change characters repeatedly. Most characters will not receive outfits from most food items anyway.
Conclusion
This review has been more negative than the score I’m giving it seems to justify, but that’s because it’s so frustrating that MKW got so close to its potential and just refused to fully commit. It’s very good as a traditional Mario Kart when it will let you play that way. The current game barely earns a recommendation, although certainly not at $90, but it could get to a solid recommendation if it simply adds settings to let you play how you want to. If they go further and really open up the world to player creativity, it could be a classic. Hopefully that game exists some day, but for now it’s an uneven experience that is determined to make you engage with its weakest parts.
Rating: 75%
Price: $90
Time to beat: Hard to define, but there are 8 cups and 8 more knockout races.
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