Nintendo took the most reliable formula in gaming and found a new idea worth building around.
I bought every Mario Kart since the SNES one and I couldn't have told you, before this, what a new one would even do differently. Every entry in the series has been a menu, where you pick a cup, pick a track, race, repeat. Mario Kart World connects every track into one continuous map you drive between, and that single change reshapes the entire game around it.
Knockout Tour is the mode I can't leave alone. Twenty-four racers run a chain of courses with no loading screens between them, and the bottom four get eliminated at each checkpoint, which does something to your brain that no Grand Prix ever has. Sitting in 21st on the last stretch of a leg turns into a full sprint for survival, elbows out, praying for a mushroom, and I've made cuts by half a kart length that felt better than most first-place finishes in Mario Kart 8. The first time I got knocked out with two racers still ahead of me I put the controller down and I went and got a glass of water, which is not a thing this series has ever made me do before.
“Surviving a Knockout Tour cut by half a kart length feels better than most first-place finishes ever did.”
I've also ridden the middle of the pack for three straight legs doing nothing of any interest whatsoever, which is the mode's honest weakness, because it's feast or famine and the famine legs are just driving.
Twenty-four karts also quietly fixes the blue shell. There's so much traffic on the road that leading stopped being the isolated death sentence it always used to be, and getting boxed in on a narrow bridge by eight karts at once is a fresh kind of chaos the twelve-racer format never managed to produce.
Free Roam I'm colder on than most of the reviews I read. It's an open version of the connected map with hidden challenges and collectibles and no structure pulling you through any of it, and after two evenings I'd definately seen enough of it. It works as a couch mode with a kid and a second controller, and my neighbor's son treats it like a driving toy and it's perfect for that, though as a solo attraction it's scenery, however good the scenery happens to be. I keep waiting to want to go back to it and I haven't yet.
The roster is the biggest in series history and the strange picks are the best part of it. I main a Cheep Cheep now. It has no arms, it holds the steering wheel anyway, and nobody at Nintendo explains this, which is the correct amount of explanation.
It holds 60fps docked and handheld with all twenty-four racers on screen, and the tracks blend into each other with real scenery in between instead of an abstract void.
Grand Prix and Battle Mode are both still here and both still sharp, and I played more Battle Mode with four people in a room than I did on my own, which is roughly the ratio it has always been for me.
The eighty-dollar price is the loudest complaint since launch and it's a fair one. This is still fundamentally more Mario Kart, and asking that much for it is asking a lot on the strength of one structural idea, however good the idea turns out to be.
It's the first entry since the SNES with a new idea sitting at the center rather than out at the margins, which is most of what I'd want from the series at this point. I couldn't tell you whether Knockout Tour survives contact with a year of people learning its routes, because part of what makes it work right now is that nobody knows where the shortcuts are yet, and Nintendo has said nothing about rotating the course chains. I've got the armless fish, a middling win rate and no intention of changing either one.