So, I've played quite a bit of Mario Kart World. Mind you, only winning the 150cc cups with my sister, I haven't played Free Roam. This is fresh off of playing Kirby Air Riders and Sonic Racing Crossworlds; I'll preface with this: both racing games are much better than Mario Kart World despite what Geoff Keighley might tell you in which I'll try to explain in-depth why that's the case. Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who has played and loved the series as a whole, so a lot of it comes from the heart as someone who has hyped Mario Kart Wii, 8, 7 (especially 8) as one of the most hyped up games of all time.
I really think Nintendo dropped the ball hard on this game, and so much of their design philosophy contradicts with our ability to simply have fun here, as well as so many archaic design choices that plague this game that other racing games have moved on from. I didn't come into this game with good expectations, especially after coming off the demo I played on the kiosk at Target, but after getting a proper run with it with my sister through all cups in the game in 150cc, the entire design of the game is lampooned by its awful track design and lackluster racing mechanics, which is the crux of most of the game's problems. The addition of 24 racers also contributes to this design and I think it's a big mistake: adding more racers has decreasing returns and I really think 24 is an unnecessary amount that also is resource intensive and contributes to the ridiculously wide track design. While we played against CPUs, never once did we drop below 12th place and if we did, we quickly got out of it, even in 150cc. I'm aware they did patch to make the CPUs easier, but their difficulty fluctuates and then they just let you win like in the last lap. They're not difficult, and every single time we reset the Grand Prix, it was only because the rival CPU placed 2nd instead of both of us being 1st and 2nd.
The routes (aka "intermissions") are terribly designed and are ill-fitted to be in Mario Kart. Had this been in a much faster racing game like Forza Horizons or Sonic Racing Crossworlds, they would have been very fun. Here? Mario Kart's strong points has never been its sense of speed: Mario Kart has extremely maneuverable vehicles that can take tight turns, and most Mario Kart tracks knows this (it's tough to drive in Mario Kart tracks with a conventional vehicle in something like Beam.ng). So much bouts of the game has you racing in a straight line while jack all is happening, and this is especially apparent on the route to Crown City, where we memed it being a morning commute and we just obeyed traffic laws while we were "racing" (we both ened up destroying the rival 150cc CPU in this "race"). 200cc would have alleviated some of my speed concerns with this game, but IMO it's a band-aid solution to the whole issue of tracks being way too wide where no turns are difficult to handle save for the tightest of loops in 150cc (like the U-Turn in Mario Circuit). The route design also is extremely counter-productive to learning the tracks too, because you spend the last lap on the track and thus the tracks become insanely forgettable as a result. One track in the game is literally just a straight line of up and down, (Peach Stadium I believe) and it was an awful part of the track. The game's Rainbow Road is a whole lot of being pretty without having any sort of substantial gameplay about it at all: people say it looks pretty but it plays terribly and I think it's probably the second worst Rainbow Road in the series, after the original N64 Rainbow Road because it's just mindboggingly boring to race on, having the same issues as a lot of tracks of being simply too wide and straight to have fun on it.
The new driving mechanics being the ability to leap off the ground and drive on the wall and drive on rails are fun additions, but they mean very little when the game's overall track design is so poor. Yes, I've seen advanced tricks online, and yes they do look fun to pull off, but to me, it's not worth learning it just because of how overall boring the game is and the counterintuitive straight lines and ridiculously wide roads. At least they should give you the ability to boost further when you perform stunts while you're in the air so doing more than one stunt actually means something than just giving you a button to mash while you're in the air, like how the Sonic Racing games do it.
Oh yeah, the items kind of suck in this game and much of the useful items you can get amount to trying to smack the CPUs down with Red Shells because virtually every item in get in like 2nd or 3rd are useless triple Bananas or coins or Coin Blocks, plus the Fire Flowers are nerfed hard in this game by being much slower and less spammable (the blue icy Fire Flowers are literally...what's the point of having them, they're functionally just a palette swap entirely). The Spiny Shell as a first place control item has became entirely archaic especially compared to other kart racers of its ilk (especially in the Sonic Racing games which have much better and fairer first place control items), the only counterplay is holding onto a Super Horn and hoping you don't get hit by a Lightning Bolt or a Boo stealing your item.
The soundtrack? It's a mixed bag. It has its share of great tunes, it's great if you're nostalgic for them, but it has its share of trash rearrangements. I liked Moonview Highway and Vancouver Velocity. I disliked SNES Koopa Beach and Rosalina's Ice World. I can barely hear the music in this game and I really wish I can turn the music off in Free Roam to get immersed and soak into the world's ambiance thanks to Nintendo's dogmatic insistance that we have to play with their sound mixing as intended, their solution to this is one of the worst cases of sound mixing options I have ever seen in a video game. Speaking of rearrangements from a track design perspective, so many returning tracks I think got completely butchered, this includes Choco Mountain, Dino Dino Jungle, Wario Stadium; those are the types of tracks I criticized earlier when they refurbished Ribbon Road in Mario Kart 8. If they're going to bring back tracks and redo them to the point of being virtually unrecognizable, there's just little point of "returning" them at all and just design an entirely new track and layout in whatever new theme they're doing. In something like Dino Dino Jungle, they really should have just left the old track alone, and designed a new one entirely.
The vehicle unlocking system has become ridiculously archaic at this point: I'm so tired of collecting 100 coins to unlock some bullshit random part and more often than not, it's a vehicle that I really don't want to use. What exactly is wrong with the conventional approach of going to a store and buying the parts you want that other racing games employ? The vehicle customization system sucks in this game too (one of the worst vehicle customization options in racing games period), and those stickers (which serve as the game's only worthwhile unlocks especially in the Free Roam mode) are horrible and barely worth mentioning. It's a huge waste of development resources too: the stickers are fun and well-designed and would look impeccable if they were actually sold as merch that you can stick in your actual car, but here? They're tiny-ass little JPGs you almost never see in your vehicle or a tiny ass icon next to your character, so much better development resources could have been spent being able just to tweak the paint of your kart. It would have been less development budget and much more reward if you're able to at least freely change the color of your vehicle to express yourself, and I've been asking for a paint job feature since forever. A lot of the vehicle designs I do not like and some of them I do like the design but I don't like the color (Hot Rod and Chargin' Truck) and having a color change option would have alleviated that. I miss the ability to slap Monster tires on every single vehicle in the game and the removal of the feature is very frustrating to me.
For some fucking reason, I don't know why the costume and the "NPC driver" unlock system is what it is: an unconventional convoluted mess, just designed for the sake of being different than other racing games. Why do I have to eat at a drive-through at some particular fuck-off area in the map to unlock costumes? Why do I have to wait until Kamek changes me into some jackass just to unlock them? Why does it even change the character I'm using at all, like what's the point? I want to play as Baby Luigi, why the fuck is the game changing me to a character I don't even want to play as? Plus, why is there a ridiculous uneven distribution of character costumes in this game? Why doesn't Baby Luigi have a swimwear alt???? Anyway, these unlocks could have been part of the P-Switch objective in Free Roam instead of just unlocking those useless bullshit stickers but here we are. The new characters are give and take, I personally don't care about them much, especially the throw-away NPC drivers but they're not worth the cost of the cut racers either (yes they had to cut racers for no reason).
Oh I didn't go into much depth with Free Roam. There's zero excuse to have it to be single player only (two players can only access it through some janky bullshit so like...why not have natural integration), and without co-op Free Roam, there's no reason to engage with that mode. The entire thing is just a colorful barren wasteland. I wish you can turn the music off here and I wish there's a first person option, btw, both features that used to be present in a past Mario Kart. I also didn't bother playing with Knockout Tour for the same reasons, though peolpe say it's the highlight of the game buuuut...I don't know if the context is playing co-op with friends offline or playing online, but I don't think this mode will alleviate any of the deep-seated issues I have with the game as a whole so blah.
The voices are rather dull and forgettable too. Whatever happened to satisfying voice effects we got in Mario Kart: Double Dash, Mario Kart Wii, and Mario Kart 7? I've had issues with the voice since Mario Kart 8 and they're still highly prevalent here too, where they take a backseat to all sounds in the game. At least the explosion sound is very satisfying.
The game's graphics are nothing to write home about, but I will not blame the game for this: they obviously have to make sacrifices to make this run at a fixed 60fps including two player splitscreen so I can forgive them for some rough edges in its presentation. 24 racers again are rather expendable though, I'd rather they cut the amount back to 12 if that means we can have a game that looks and runs better. Performance is probably the game's best thing about it, but honestly, you can only polish its mediocre gameplay loop so much and at the end of the day it's still just a mediocre Mario Kart game no matter how polished the gameplay is.
So anyway, I've spent a lot of time griping about this game, the good parts of the game? Absolutely the characters. If your favorite is playable, seeing them is literally the only reason you'll have fun with this game. I know it was for me. Which really makes this game all the more tragic. I really didn't want to gripe about this game as much as I did. There was a lot of heart poured onto the body and facial animations of these characters, and it makes me all the more sad that these lovable and beloved characters are stuck to an aggressively mediocre Mario Kart. I'm so happy Baby Luigi even got two alts, even if that meant he had the least alts out of all baby characters (again no Swimwear Baby Luigi is a Geneva Convention violation and I stand by that). He's extremely lovable in this game.
The worst part of all of this is that Nintendo charges 80 dollars for this game. I know this talking point has been brought up over and over again and I'm sure many of you are tired of hearing it at this point but it must be repeated because Nintendo should be held up to higher standards than this. Nintendo HAD put their games out with higher standards than this. Mario Kart World DOES have hints of it in it which makes my entire gripes all the more infuriating because I know they can do better than this. However the game we got is basically a game that screams "we need to move Switch 2 units because Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has been such a smash hit" rather than "we want to make a good and fun kart racer that everybody can enjoy, whether they're new to the game or are veterans", and Mario Kart World at this point really feels like it was designed for newbies than Mario Kart veterans. Never had I felt so burnt out from a Mario Kart title, especially coming from playing Mario Kart 8 for so, so, so long, and this entry only exacerbated it. In the wake of the timespan since the release of 8 until now, so much better kart racers that have further pushed the envelope has came out since (Kirby Air Riders and Sonic Racing Crossworlds, both came out this year, and I don't want to go into much detail into why both those two games really felt like they wanted to be a good kart racer on their own merits with so much customization and fun mechanics unique to them than selling on just its brand name alone) that this kind of quality from Mario Kart is unacceptable, and I don't think diehard Mario Kart fans have to put up with such mediocrity.
Anyway, tl;dr: the game is 6/10 from a Mario Kart fan's perspective for any of you who won't bother reading my post so here you go I guess. Baby Luigi and his little charming obscene gesture he does at the beginning of Knockout Tour himself cannot carry this game unfortunately.
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