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

-Around 20 hours so far. After about 20 hours of experience with the new Mario Kart, I think I can say where I stand on it, even if I have several more hours to play. So far, I've done a solid amount of the open world exploration, gotten 3 stars in 150cc in all the Grand Prix cups, and 3 stars in most of the Knockout Tour cups. I also unlocked mirror mode and did most of those tracks, but haven't gotten to trying to get 3 stars in them yet. Right now, I'm teetering between an 8/10 and a 9/10 on this one. I see very few issues with this open world compared to many other people, and I think it comes from how you approach it. I go into this open world expecting a sandbox area with some fun little challenges to knock out. I'm driving for 20-30 mins max, no Breath of the Wild or Mario Odyssey type exploration here, which feels like a lot of people were weirdly expecting? Like, the open world is a way to facilitate the new structure of connected courses. It's a byproduct of that vision, not the core focus of the game like many seem to think. So far, I've really enjoyed casually driving around the open world between races and knocking out some challenges. I have very few issues with it. I remember when I was a kid playing Mario Kart 64, I always wanted to explore the area around Peach's castle for some reason. Like, I wanted to drive up to the castle like in Mario 64 and just look around. It's dumb, but this open world area kind of made that wish come true for me. It's not just tracks existing in their own realm, floating in space; they connect in ways that make sense. The main issue for the open world I DO have is that it needs some sort of checklist to keep track of what things you have completed in each area. It's annoying to have to look it up and likely go one by one to figure out what P switches and coins you've collected if you want to 100% the game. When it comes to races, they're a blast, and the new driving tech in this game is a delight to master. Wall riding and rail grinding are top-tier Mario Kart stuff. However, I do think there is definitely a balance issue when it comes to racers and items. Either there are too many racers, 24 is double the previous entry, or there are too many items, as they kept the MK8D and MKDD additions of holding 2 items at once. Why they chose to both double the racers AND keep double items is beyond me; it's a bit much. It's not terrible, and it doesn't ruin my experience, but there will be situations when you play this where you know you just got decimated by 15 different racers holding double items. For the format of the races, I can definitely understand if someone misses the 3-lap traditional tracks, but I absolutely welcome something new. MK8D mastered what those kinds of Mario Kart games could be. I appreciate the new format here. I hope an update can be added in the future to include a 3-lap traditional grand prix. That would be a huge addition that I don't think would require a lot of manpower to do. I think that this game is being put under a microscope because it is the main selling point of the Switch 2 right now. If you like Mario Kart, I'd find it hard to believe you'd dislike this one. If you don't like Mario Kart, it won't win you over whatsoever. By the way, this is an ALL-TIME soundtrack by Nintendo. Yes, it's mostly remixes of songs from the Mario series, but it was so incredibly well done. Overall, I think MK8D was the best Mario Kart can be, and this one is very close, but the sheer amount of content added from Deluxe's DLC puts it on top of this one for now. Here's hoping this gets some DLC as time goes on.