4/5 ★ – Hootus900's review of Mario Kart World.

It’s been over a decade since the last original mainline entry in the Mario Kart series, and I was worried this one wouldn’t live up to the hype. I would say it very much exceeded my expectations, but there’s a couple things that take away from the experience overall. Firstly I love the track design. The Mario Kart team always cooks in this area and there’s no exception here. My main gripe here is with the structure of gran prix and knockout tour, you’re only going to do a full 3 laps through a handful of these courses, and the rest you’re doing only 1 before driving through to the next. This left me forgetting about the courses until exploring them fully in free roam mode, so if I had only played casually I might not have remembered half of the tracks. That being said, the free roam mode was crazy how extensive and massive it is. It was really cool to see all these tracks and being able to casually explore them, with collectibles and challenges to keep me occupied. I haven’t been mind blown like this since Tears of the Kingdom and discovering the depths for the first time, realizing how massive that was as well. I think the one area they fumbled here is with the collectibles. All they unlock is stickers, which to my knowledge you can only have 1 equipped to your kart at a time. They also didn’t include a checklist system, which one can argue takes the pressure off and encourages casual exploration, but it didn’t give me that classic Nintendo itch to 100% the map. These two issues knocked it down for me, but I applaud Nintendo for taking this massive swing, and I absolutely think there is enough content to justify the price for entry, especially if you got the discount with the console bundle. Honorable mention goes to the soundtrack! The Mario kart team is god tier in terms of music composition, taking new and old tracks and amping them up with great vibes and infusing them with jazzy energy to hype up the gameplay immensely. Hearing a remix of a track from games I grew up on was always a delight. Overall for a brand new entry in a long time, I think they did an outstanding job. There probably won’t be a new entry for a long time, so I really hope they continue to support this with new tracks (and maybe a story mode for free roam??). My main concern is in 10 years, will the gaming community be itching to scratch a MK World itch, or will this one not stand the test of time?