2.5/5 ★ – DarkDrawer's review of Mario Kart World.

Maybe it's unfair to look at a game like Mario Kart and expect more because of the price, but this is simply an unacceptable amount of content considering the amount you're buying. I'll start with the positives. It's a new game with a fresh load of paint. Aside from Donkey Kong, everybody in the game is expressive and the costumes add something new to look forward to when playing. A good amount of courses are good and the new trick system is pretty interesting. Knockout Tour is also fun despite some things about the system not being so. This is not a comprehensive list, but overall, this is the main source of fun for me. Now to the negatives, the customization of this game is what I noticed for. For instance, the new animal characters seemingly don't have costumes? Maybe it's select creatures, but overall it makes their inclusion seem gimmicky and especially unworthy compared to say more Donkey Kong Series Reps, Diddy Kong is noticeably not here. Although Multiplayer is pretty good in terms of connectivity and stuff just working with being able to go to a person's lobby and race in the open world before selecting a gamemode, you can't do Grand Prix together. Also, some issues with characters seemingly getting hit but don't happens often. Additionally, the new course in between sections end up making learning the new course you're going to very hard as you essentially only get to learn it twice before its already over. The core gameplay of this game is, at the end of the day, Mario Kart. Therefore, I don't really understand the inclusion of the open world? For a game you can only move forward (or slowly backwards), it feels unintuitive to have a world that isn't really asking you to explore it. There's not really anything to indicate what you could explore aside from the map, so there's not bloat, but it seemingly serves little purpose. The gameplay itself with more players available is complete chaos. The midranks in the match are getting redshelled, the last place are struggling to get forward, the star power in this game is heavily nerfed now (for some reason). I was hopeful in the trailers that getting hit wouldnt be as big of a penalty as previous games, but it is seemingly only computers that start up fast again. As I got this through the bundle, I did not spend $80 to play this, but overall for the first game announced at $80 to my knowledge, there is not justification for the content being as whatever as it is.