Nintendo showed off a lot of little details for Mario Kart World during the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct this week. That was a good idea since A) it’s the only big first-party game hitting store shelves the same day as the Switch 2, and B) Nintendo is asking players to spend $80 on it. Mario Kart looks bigger and better than ever before and, frankly, it needs to. The best detail? The addition of Titanfall-style wall-riding, which I want to see in basically every game.
Switch 2 Welcome Tour is also launching on June 5, but that is a glorified pack-in, and it’s frankly offensive that Nintendo is expecting people to pay for it.
Off The Mario Kart 8 Rails
Mario Kart 8 kept the series on rails for a decade, not rocking the boat as it rocketed to the series’ (and, aside from Wii Sports, Nintendo’s) best sales ever, but Mario Kart World is taking the train off the tracks. It’s the first open-world Mario Kart game allowing players to drive from course to course in between races. Races support 24 competitors, a huge leap from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s 12. You can grind on rails like Sonic the Hedgehog and, most importantly, you can wall run like a Titanfall pilot.
Titanfall 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, with a perfect, compact campaign I return to every few years. It has the best traversal I’ve ever experienced in a game — building brilliant levels like ‘Effect and Cause’ around the simple kinetic joy of running on walls. If you’ve played Titanfall 2, you are forever cursed with the awareness that every other game is not Titanfall 2. So I was delighted to see that Nintendo is aping its movement mechanics for Mario Kart World .
Ride Walls, Red Walls
It’s unclear how big of a role Titanfall-esque traversal will play in the game, as it only gets a pair of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances in the trailer. From 1:09-1:11, the Mario Kart World gameplay trailer shows our favorite plumber-turned-racer riding sideways along walls as he bounces between them, and we get a similar shot of Peach doing the same thing from 1:53-1:55. So, it doesn’t seem to be character or kart specific, though the two shots do look like they may be on the same course — so this might be limited to one area.
Both shots also have the characters bouncing between a specific type of wall — red metal with a chain link structure. So, it seems like wall-riding may be limited to those kinds of walls, but it may just be that those walls are the kind you can ride along in that specific level. The trailer shows characters grinding along various kinds of rails, so it seems possible that there will be equivalent walls for other courses.
For now, we don’t know. Mario Kart World is far more focused on open-ended traversal than past games, as players will be traveling between courses and freely exploring the world, but it’s unclear just how Titanfall it’ll be. Hopefully, we’ll be able to wall ride often, but if we can’t, I hope the world still feels open to all sorts of tomfoolery. If I’m spending nearly 100 dollars for the privilege, I hope I get my money’s worth.
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Mario Kart World Steals Every Good Idea In Racing Game History
Mario Kart World is part Forza Horizon, part Crash Team Racing, and part Sonic All-Star Racing Transformed.