“Mario Kart World”: Nintendo gives the Switch 2 a perfect figurehead

Rest assured: mushrooms, turtle shells, and banana peels are still there. Mario Kart World, released on June 5th on Switch 2, is the ninth installment of Nintendo's famous racing games. The sprightly plumber Mario and his motley crew of friends and rivals still compete on crazy tracks, driving whimsical vehicles. The big new feature is the exploration of a vast world map, where race circuits flow seamlessly into one another – a game mode called "stroll."

The innovation could have seemed like a simple commercially calculated update of the previous Mario Kart 8. The latter is in fact “the fifth best-selling video game of all time, with more than 76 million copies sold on Wii U and Switch consoles since its release in 2014,” recalls The Washington Post . But this brand new Mario Kart nevertheless shakes up the codes. Notably, at a time when “ games as a service ” are releasing additions drop by drop after their release, Mario Kart World has chosen a different approach. “It is packed with content, with an incalculable number of characters, the most open world in the series and all the expected game modes.”