A reader is unimpressed by Mario Kart World on the Nintendo Switch 2 and argues that the controversial free roam mode is not its only issue.
As a day one Nintendo Switch 2 owner: I have to admit I’m a little disappointed. Not with the console itself, which I think is pretty much perfect for the price and what it has to do, but with the only game worth getting at launch: Mario Kart World .
Now, I don’t think it’s terrible, but I do think that not only is it not as good Mario Kart 8 but that it's kind of a flawed experiment and one of the weakest entries in the whole series. But I'll talk about the positives first, just to show it's not all bad.
Knockout Tour is great, I think everyone would agree. It's a bit boring in single-player, but fantastic online and the game’s best feature. I also like all the weird extra characters, although how you unlock them and the costumes is very random and unsatisfying. The open world is also very nicely designed in its own right, and very large, but… that’s kind of all I’ve got in terms of praise.
First, I’ll get the obvious thing out of the way: the open world is completely wasted. None of the challenges in it are interesting, if you can even find them, and a lot of them are overly hard and frustrating. There’s no story or dialogue or anything. You just drive around at random in free roam and hope you come across something interesting, which you almost certainly won’t.
If any game was born to have fetch quests in it, it was this, and yet there’s nothing like that. It all feels like it’s waiting for the actual game to be dropped onto the world, but there’s nothing there. Maybe it will come in DLC, but even if it’s free, why wasn’t it there from the start? Why wouldn’t you go all out for basically your only launch game? It’s baffling.
But for me that’s not the real problem because, rightly or wrongly, free roam is really just a side show. My problem is that the actual racing in the two main modes is very dull. It may not seem that way when you’ve got a dozen people firing shells at you at once, but that gets old very quickly, and it doesn’t actually happen that much, especially in single-player.
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