I wouldn’t say it’s “slow” per se but it does feel different, and in some ways I believe it’s not as good as its predecessors.
One consideration is that it does not have the 200cc mode that MK8 added after the fact. It’s currently (maybe permanently?) at the default max speed of 150cc.
Another consideration are the courses. Previous MK games use circuit courses, where you start at the finish line and you race in 3 or more laps in a circle that goes back to the same finish line. MK8 fleshed out a bit more by incorporating lengthy straightaway courses where you start at point A and race to point B with laps being more like checkpoints along the way, but the majority were still circuits. Mario Kart World, on the other hand, is primarily straightaway style tracks with only a small smattering of circuits, because it’s attempting to integrate everything with the open world map they made. So the majority of races feel harder to pace because most of them do not repeat themselves.
There’s also the fact that they doubled the number of characters in each race compared to MK8. MK8 had 12 racers per course, MKW has 24. All of those racers are still picking up items, still tossing red shells and blue shells everywhere, still spamming lightning, etc., so it feels a lot more chaotic.
Accommodating that aspect is the fact that it now takes 20 coins to hit max speed instead of 10, because they assume you’re going to get hit by more things that you can’t avoid, so it can take longer to ramp up your speed from the beginning of the race.
Final consideration off the top of my head is that you no longer choose parts of a kart like you did in MK8, you simply choose a racer and choose a cart, and your stars are based only on a combination of those two factors. It is more difficult to optimize for things like acceleration, max speed, and turning because you can no longer mix and match parts that exactly fit your stat preferences.
So my opinion at least is that MK8 is still the better Mario Kart game, and just considering how huge it is and the fact that it still runs well on Switch 2 tells me that it’s still worth keeping it around. MKW is still a fun game and I’d recommend it for Mario Kart fans looking to change things up a bit, but it tried a lot of new things, not all of which work as well as I think they could have.
slimerancher@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Shameless plug, but you should join !nintendo@lemmy.world 😀
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
just did, thanks!