Mario Kart World review: the undisputed king of kart games
Gaming
Nintendo's iconic racer launches the Switch 2 in style Skip 5 photos in the image carousel and continue reading
Believe it or not, it's been just over a decade since the previous Mario Kart game in the series, Mario Kart 8, was originally released in its non-Deluxe form on the ill-fated Wii U console. If you want some perspective on how long ago that was, back then there were only six Star Wars movies. Mario Kart World has been a long time coming and what's more it bears the responsibility of being the only proper Nintendo launch title for the firm's impressive new Switch 2 console. No pressure then.
Fortunately, at the risk of ruining the dramatic suspense, Mario Kart World is an excellent game. As most videogame fans know, Nintendo rarely misses with the games it produces in-house and MKW is no exception. It's a glorious, chaotic, 24-kart stampede to the finish line and retains the series' crown as the undisputed king of sofa based, elbow-to-ribcage multiplayer.
Advertisement - Page continues below
That's not to say things haven't changed. The World in the title is a clue that this game contains the most significant change to the Mario Kart format since the first game. Rather than individual themed circuits, the tracks themselves are part of a sprawling open world and connected by traffic-filled highways. A championship will start with three laps of a particular circuit, but for the second race the mad dash to the next track is part of the event. The entire thing is reminiscent of Wacky Races as the pack careens across the landscape, leaving no fence unsplintered and no ramp unjumped.
Our initial concern was that the tracks themselves would lose their unique character as part of a sandbox world, but while there's a dud or two, the creativity and inventiveness of the tracks is a real highlight. We won't spoil the specifics, but Mario Kart World's iteration of the infamous Rainbow Road in particular is absolutely stunning and feels like a victory lap for the developers. The fact that you can 'spoil' a racetrack at all gives you some idea of how special it is. You might like
The open world also allows for Knockout Tour, which is rapidly becoming our favourite way to play Mario Kart online. It's a vast, point-to-point elimination race, which starts with a full grid of 24 karts, and whittles that down at checkpoints along the route. It's fantastically stressful, not least because the back of the pack is only ever a poorly timed red shell away, and a new slipstreaming mechanic keeps the pack more tightly bunched than ever, but scraping through to the next stage of the race is always exhilarating. On balance, we reckon it's well worth the years it's inevitably taking off your life in cardiological strain.
The only criticism we'd level at the game is that, outside of races and Knockout Tour, the open world feels underutilised. It's more like a big staging area for races than it is a world worth exploring on its own merits. There are small challenges and collectibles in there, but the button to enter the free-roam mode is almost apologetically tucked away in the bottom right hand corner of the main menu. This doesn't detract from the stuff that makes Mario Kart World essential, but given Nintendo's reputation for stuffing its worlds with entertaining, rewarding distractions and secrets, it feels a smidge undercooked.
Advertisement - Page continues below
READ MORE Remembering classic games: Super Mario Kart (1993)
Still, that means more time for the serious business of thumping your mates with a blue shell and cackling as you drift past with rainbow sparks lighting up the rear wheels. Or partaking in 'just one more' multiplayer Knockout Tour as the clock ticks over to 3am. Like the games in the series before it, Mario Kart World is the universal racing game, loved by everyone from toddlers to similarly drooling and incoherent post-pub gatherings. If you're looking for a game to put the joy back in your joypad, this is it.
Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Look out for your regular round-up of news, reviews and offers in your inbox.
Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Metro
2 hours ago
- Metro
The 8 worst Nintendo games ever - from Welcome Tour to Donkey Kong Jet Race
Following the launch of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, GameCentral looks back on the worst Nintendo games ever made. Whereas Mario Kart World is a joyous experience worth getting a Nintendo Switch 2 for, the only other first party title available for the system is Nintendo Switch 2 World Tour: a shockingly banal experience unbecoming of a company like Nintendo. Reviews were late in arriving, because consoles weren't sent out more than a day before launch, so it's taken a while for the game to get a consensus of review on Metacritic. But now that it has, it's sitting at just 52. That makes it one of the worst reviewed games that Nintendo itself has ever made – but not the very worst. Badly reviewed games are impressively rare in Nintendo's discography, with most never getting any worse than average. But if you've ever wanted to see what a genuinely bad game from Nintendo looks like, here is their hall of shame… Metacritic score: 52 Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Just to get the ball rolling, let's start with the impetus for this list. While there's far worse yet to come, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is baffling in how sterile and un-Nintendo-like it is in its presentation. Be sure to read our full review for a proper breakdown, but per Metacritic, it's only scored higher than two games this year: hack and slash action game Captain Blood and Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator. Metacritic score: 54 Not only one of the worst games Nintendo has ever made but almost certainly their least asked for sequel as well. Arriving six years after the already unpopular launch game 1-2-Switch (Metacritic score: 58) it's baffling as to who thought this would be a good idea. If a 2022 report is to be believed, it bombed so hard with playtesters that some Nintendo execs were hesitant about releasing Everybody 1-2-Switch out of fear it would damage the company's reputation. It didn't, but you can't help but wonder why Nintendo bothered. Metacritic score: 46 Titled Donkey Kong Barrel Blast elsewhere in the world, this racing spin-off was originally designed as a GameCube game you controlled with the DK Bongos accessory. However, it was delayed and retrofitted for the Wii to make use of the Wii remote and nunchuk. The end result was a physically and mentally tiring experience, given how much motion-controlled shaking was required, although we don't think it would've been much better on GameCube thanks to how shallow and dull the actual racing is. Metacritic score: 49 The original Chibi-Robo! on GameCube was a flawed but mildly interesting distraction, with some neat ideas, but every subsequent sequel seemed to strip away its best qualities and make things worse with every new entry. Chibi-Robo! Let's Go, Photo! (aka Chibi-Robo! Photo Finder) was designed to show off the 3DS's camera and AR features, but it didn't use them very well. The end result is a simply awful collection of minigames and while normally people would be upset that the game was lost to the ether, when the 3DS eShop shut down, it's hard to care in this instance. Although these games weren't developed by Nintendo itself, they were published by them, as format exclusives, and in many cases they're even worse than the in-house failures. Devil's Third – A Wii U exclusive from the creator of Ninja Gaiden and Dead Or Alive, Devil's Third is a laughably awful action game that is almost so bad it's good. Gardening Mama 2: Forest Friends – This was only published by Nintendo in Europe – for some reason – with its drab collection of minigames unlikely to please even the most undemanding child. My Pokémon Ranch – This barely counts as a game, since it serves mostly as a place to store pokémon from other games, but it did include a number of vapid minigames and some extremely ugly 3D models. Metacritic score: 53 We were stuck on whether this or the Wii U's Game & Wario is the worst WarioWare game, but at least Game & Wario has a couple of fun minigames. We're not sure the same can be said for WarioWare: Snapped. A digital download made exclusively for the Nintendo DSi and its digital cameras, it had a criminally small pool of microgames that often didn't work and weren't even that micro – thus eliminating the manic, fast-paced excitement of the rest of the WarioWare series. Metacritic score: 46 Although the Pokémon games aren't made in-house at Nintendo, we still think they should count, since Pokémon is one of the company's premiere franchises and, as evidenced by Pokémon Dash, something they consider useful to push a new console launch. This racing spin-off was one of the very first DS games and it forced you to use the stylus for making Pikachu (who was the only playable character for some reason) race through painfully uninteresting courses. Metacritic score: 53 Pokémon Battle Revolution felt very much like the Wii successor to the Pokémon Stadium games, letting you bring your party of pokémon from the 2D games into 3D. While it did boast online play, it lacked the meaty single-player content seen in the Stadium games, making it nothing more than a battle simulator. Considering the same developer, Genius Sonority, had previously made the fan favourite Pokémon Colosseum spin-offs, this was quite the downgrade. Metacritic score: 46 It's still so strange that after Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the 3DS, the next traditional Animal Crossing game wouldn't be until Animal Crossing: New Horizons roughly eight years later. The only entry the Wii U ever saw was Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, an atrocious board game spin-off that demands you have the appropriate amiibo figures to play and yet has no real gameplay to speak of. You just watch things happen. How the same studio went on to make Super Mario Party Jamboree beggars' belief. More Trending For as bad as these games are, it speaks volumes to Nintendo's quality control that this is the worst that we could find. In fact, if you look at Nintendo's output on Metacritic, very few games it's published have scored lower than an average score of 50. Past that, you start getting to games that may be considered bad by Nintendo's standards but are otherwise inoffensive, such as Wario: Master Of Disguise (Metacritic score: 60) and Kirby Air Ride (Metacritic score: 61). And yet clearly Nintendo isn't bothered by these atypical duds. They didn't take the hint with 1-2-Switch, they kept making Chibi-Robo! games for years, and, bizarrely, Kirby Air Ride is getting a sequel later this year – despite being one of their lowest rated games ever and the Switch 2 already having a Nintendo racing game, in Mario Kart World. It just goes to show how unpredictable Nintendo can be, not just in the sort of games it releases and their quality, but also which ones it thinks are worth revisiting. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Nintendo Switch 2 officially breaks record for fastest-selling console ever MORE: How to unlock everything in Mario Kart World: all characters, costumes and more MORE: MindsEye still has no reviews but plenty of bugs in 'disastrous' launch
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
John Noone obituary
My father, John Noone, who has died aged 89, was a writer probably best known for his first novel, The Man With the Chocolate Egg, in which the main character, a British soldier, sits on a London bus, exhausted and disoriented, and pulls the pin out of a hand grenade. Published in 1966, when John was just 30, the book was joint winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1967. He continued with his writing for 60 more years, while for many years making his living as an English lecturer at academic institutions around the world. Born in Darlington, County Durham, John was the third of the six children of Michael Noone, an industrial engineer, and Miriam (nee Knox), a homemaker. He was educated at St Mary's grammar school and then did his national service in the Durham Light Infantry before graduating with an English degree from King's College, Newcastle (now Newcastle University). While in the army he had served in the Suez canal zone, and in 1961 he returned to Egypt to work as an English lecturer at Alexandria University. From that point onwards, apart from a couple of years in the late 1960s, John lived outside the UK, lecturing on English literature and European culture under the aegis of the British Council, including at the University of Benghazi in Libya and the University of Kyoto, Japan. His second novel, The Night of Accomplishment (1974), was written in Japan following the break-up of his decade-long marriage to my mother, Kate Turnbull. Later in Kyoto he met Isabelle Forani, a a francophone Belgian. They lived together in France from 1980 until John's death, and married in 1994. During the 80s John turned to writing nonfiction with The Man Behind the Iron Mask (1988), a piece of research that aimed to discover the identity of a mysterious prisoner of state held at the instructions of Louis XIV of France. His later works included the two volume Turtle Tortoise, Image and Symbol (2013), examining the use of images and symbols of turtles and tortoises from early times, and three psychological thrillers, O Fortuna (2016), Anteros (2017) and Culler of Beasts (2019). A collection of his short stories, Like As Not, was published in 2018. He is survived by Isabelle, by me, and by two stepdaughters, Nochenka and Cynthia, from Isabelle's previous marriage.
The Sun
3 hours ago
- The Sun
Millions of Amazon Prime subscribers receive fresh batch of freebies worth £59 TODAY – there's even more coming in days
AMAZON Prime subscribers will receive £59 worth of freebies today, with even more great deals in the coming days. With the deal automatically included in your Prime membership, make sure you make the most of the unmissable offer this June. 3 3 3 Those with a Prime membership can already enjoy the benefits of Prime Gaming. This includes a collection of free downloadable games to keep forever, a monthly Twitch channel subscription - as well as the usual Prime benefits like free delivery and exclusive deals. Prime Gaming's cloud gaming service, Luna, gives gamers unlimited access to a selection of popular games - and it's all free with your Prime membership. What's more, you don't even need a dedicated gaming console, as you can easily play them on Amazon-compatible devices you already own like a Fire TV. Every month, a new selection of games is released across a range of popular and indie developers. Two games for this month have already been released, with two more available from today. This includes the adaptation of the popular tabletop game Mordheim: City of the Damned, created by Games Workshop as part of the Warhammer World. The "turn-based tactical game where you lead warbands into bloody and lethal skirmishes" is currently listed at a £17.99 retail price. For those looking for a more relaxing gaming experience, The Abandoned Planet features puzzle-solving and aesthetically pleasing pixel art graphic design. Microsoft finally reveals its brand new handheld console With another two games released today, it's a great time to make the most of your exclusive Prime deals. Today's deal includes a fun co-op game that requires you to work together with teammates to solve puzzles. In Death Squared, each player has to guide a robot to a colour-coded goal through deadly traps and hazards. The challenging game is a great way to improve your observation and communication skills, especially while it's free in Prime's deal, compared to its £12.79 retail price. Also released today is Station to Station, a minimalist game about building railway connections that's perfect for train enthusiasts. Released later this month, gamers can eagerly await a collection of sci-fi and RPG games. This includes Dark Envoy and FATE: Undiscovered Realms both available on June 19. Dark Envoy allows gamers to control a party of relic hunters in a conflict-torn world using an RPG and skill-based combat system. Finally, Prime subscribers can access even more exclusive deals on June 26 when three games are released on Luna. If you're looking for a game where you get to play as a sneaky thief, Thief: Deadly Shadows might be a good fit for you, saving £7.49 in the deal. Those who are looking for a sci-fi combat game might enjoy Jupiter Hell, in which "a lone space marine" is pit against "overwhelming demonic forces" using shotguns, chainguns, railguns and chainsaws. Finally, cosy gamers might enjoy the month's final release with Gallery of Things: Reveries, a relaxing game with Dada-inspired hidden object puzzles. In addition to this month's releases, subscribers can make the most of the existing catalogue. This includes popular games like Batman: Arkham Knight, LEGO DC Super-Villains, Fortnite, Fallout New Vegas: Ultimate Edition and Fallous 3: Game of the Year Edition.
