I have the Switch 2. MK world is nice I guess, but it’s nowhere near what 8 was. It feels like they were so proud of their connected gimmick they decided they would create nothing for this episode.

8 cups, almost all of them redone old tracks. The “highways” connecting them feel very similar except a couple areas (and those include, again, bits of old Mario Kart tracks). I mean, the way they redid these old tracks is cool, but base MK8 also did that very well with its 4 retro cups, and had 4 main cups full of awesome new tracks. And that’s before DLC/Deluxe added 4 extra cups.

There’s a lot of music… But apart from that game’s theme, all of it is remixes from Mario games. The karts also are almost only rides from previous episodes.

The free roaming mode is frankly not that great. I had loads of fun messing around in Forza Horizons games, but here it’s just a bit boring. Challenges must be activated and interrupt your driving, they’re mostly so easy you can mess up and still clear them, and though they do track records, they don’t do anything to make you want to improve them. Also you don’t meet other players. For fuck’s sake, the last actual Mario game had you meet and play seamlessly along random people!

MK World is like 90% fueled by nostalgia. This is not what I expect from a new Mario Kart game.