Video Game Reviews

Mario Kart World Review - A Shell to Success or a Toad in the hole?

19/6/2025

Guest Blog post by Adam Foster @AngelicWiganer / @snoopfozziefozz

Mario Kart World Review

We’re here! After weeks and months of anticipation, we finally have it. The Nintendo Switch 2 launched on the 5th of June. A bigger screen, better performance, magnetic joy cons and even a mouse mode. Lots of games coming in the next few months. However, the one that had us all salivating was Mario Kart World. A sure-fire system seller right here. You want to play Mario Kart World; you have no choice to buy the Switch 2. Simple, but genius marketing from Nintendo right here. We were even treated to a Mario Kart World Direct to feed us hungry gamers more titbits to whet our appetites until June 5th arrived. A few people have been sceptical about the whopping £75 price tag for a physical copy of the game. I am one of those sceptics. I chose to get my copy as a digital download bundled with my console. So, the time has come to give my totally unbiased review of Mario Kart World. Sit back, grab a drink and come and enjoy the ride.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe undoubtably was a huge success on the original Switch. With so many tracks to choose from on the cartridge and also the booster packs you could obtain via the eshop there was so much to do. The problem you have is “What Next?” To me that seemed to be the ultimate conundrum for Nintendo. What could you do to Mario Kart to make it bigger, better, and ultimately a deeper gaming experience. My initial thought was to make a Mario Kart All Stars kind of game, where you had every character, car and every track which had ever been released all in one game. Could you imagine how that would have been? Great yeah but still didn’t solve the problem of how you get Mario Kart to be a deeper immersive gaming experience especially in single player mode.

There are four ways to play, we have the traditional Grand Prix in 50cc, 100cc and 150cc with 4 courses for each cup of which there are initially seven to choose from, you can unlock an 8th making a total of 32 tracks on the game. The difference with the Grand Prix mode this time, is instead of four courses, with 3 or so laps on each track, you can drive to the next track in some instances which is a new and interesting addition to the game. We have the usual battle mode, which features the usual games where you shoot weapons to pop balloons and there are other challenges like coin collecting. The best addition to me is Knockout Mode. It features a long race rather than laps, where the player has to be in a certain tack position in order to carry on with the race with the ultimate goal of finishing 1st. It was a great throwback to old school arcade racers where you had to reach checkpoints in order to carry on. Our final mode is Free Roam and I’m going to come back to this later, as this is where I feel we’ve been swizzed.

Graphically, it looks great. Is it a massive improvement on Mario Kart 8? I’d say so, but certainly not a generational jump which we saw going from say N64 to GameCube. There has been some great detail though especially in the background characters in the crowd who actually look amazing and have their own animations. The music and effects are as solid as ever. Some new tunes for the new tracks and great remixes for the modernised versions of our classic tracks. Wario Stadium and Mario Circuit are fab. We have some new additions to the driving mechanics as we can now grind on rails and ride on walls to give us new short cuts and routes to the tracks, we can also get new outfits and boosts by eating the food at Yoshi Drive throughs along the way.

I have to add there was no issues at all playing online either, I had no issues on finding a game and no lag whatsoever on any time I played the game. I have to say I didn’t not use the game chat feature or use the camera function at all. I have no intention of playing this way, so I couldn’t comment on whether using this function would hamper your gameplay.

Credit: Nintendo

There’s no doubt that Mario Kart World is a good game, great fun to be had in multiplayer whether that’s online or at home in local play. My daughters had a great time playing the game against each other. They are 5 and 9 and had lots of fun playing against each other and also against me. I need to cut to the chase though. Mario Kart World in its current format is just a good game. I feel the game is a lazy effort from Nintendo. Out of the 32 courses I would say half of them are original brand-new tracks that we have never seen. But my biggest grip of all, has been this promise of a “open world” Mario Kart.

Free Roam is the “open world” that Nintendo have provided for us. Yes, I can drive around anywhere I like in this world at my hearts content. But there actually is no reason to. There are multiple little challenges you can do, like coin collecting, get from point A to Point B in a certain time frame and other little things like this. However, they offer no purpose or depth to the game. Your rewards for completing these challenges are stickers to whack on your cart. Imagine if you had Breath of the Wild and you wandered around Hyrule for ages only to collect stickers to stick on your paraglider. That’s how this feel, and that’s why it’s so bloody frustrating.

Nintendo have some of the greatest gaming developers in the world. Could they not have devised a story mode, with actual objectives in order to make a great game, a real challenging single player experience with some actual goals. Like an idea I had would have been driving round the open world and using the cart to grab weapons from the weapon box to defeat enemies and then get to a final boss battle of a certain area and use the Kart and the space around you to interact with the scenery and stuff like that to cause damage to the boss.

I suspect that we will get DLC later down the line, to further ramp up the price of the game to get the full Mario Kart World experience. What that dlc will be who can tell. What I can tell you is that whilst Mario Kart World is still a fun experience, it falls very short in adding anything new and unique as a series which I feel is getting stale a good thirty odd years after its initial release on the Super Nintendo. I’d certainly not recommend it as a £75 game. Try and get it cheaper if you can physically, but for me getting it as a download code was a frugal but ultimately great decision I have made.

I do hope that this isn’t a trend that carries on with future Nintendo software especially with their own IP’s because that would just be so disappointing for gamers and the gaming community in general. In the meantime, keep on gaming and I look forward to the upcoming release of Donkey Kong Bananaza in July.

Guest Blog post by Adam Foster @AngelicWiganer / @snoopfozziefozz

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