After a short wait of about five months from its reveal, the Nintendo Switch 2 has finally released. Nintendo fans have entered an exciting new era, one where games can display massive, beautiful environments; play in 4K; run at 60 frames per second; and…cost $80. To kick off this new generation of Nintendo’s handheld-console hybrid, they have created Mario Kart World.

Shockingly, this is the first truly new mainline Mario Kart since 2014! Mario Kart 8 has been fueling get-togethers and parties for the past decade, whether it be the original Wii U version or its more successful Deluxe port on the first Switch. And while Mario Kart 8 has received plenty of content over the years, it’s safe to say that the series is more than deserving of a new entry at this point. Of course, with how excellent and content-filled Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was, there is a high bar for Mario Kart World to reach in order to stand out. To add to this challenge, Nintendo is charging $80 for Mario Kart World rather than the traditional $60 we’re used to.

Like any other Mario Kart game, you can pick from a wide variety of characters from the Mario series and your choice of numerous karts, bikes, and ATVs as a vehicle (you now simply choose a premade vehicle, rather than having to create a custom vehicle with various body and wheel options, like the past few games). You’ll race against 23 other players (double that of previous games) on various tracks while aiming for first place. You’ll find yourself avoiding various enemies and obstacles from the Mario universe, like Goombas and Piranha Plants. Coins are also scattered around courses. As you pick them up in a race, your speed will increase ever so slightly. Collecting them also unlocks new vehicles.

You’ll frequently drive into item boxes, which give you various Mario-themed items you can use to your advantage. These include Mushrooms that give you a boost or Shells that can be thrown as projectiles to hit and slow down other racers. Other items are much more chaotic, like the Lightning Bolt that briefly shrinks everyone and causes them to drop their items or the infamous Blue Shell that traps the player in first place in an explosion. You’ll also find new items, including Dash Food, which usually changes the appearance of your character. Roughly half the characters have a selection of costumes to unlock through this item.

Mario Kart World introduces many other new changes to the formula as well. Like always, you can hold R while turning to drift and release to boost. However, holding R while going straight will instead charge up a jump. You can use this to hop over obstacles or even onto the sides of walls, allowing you to briefly drive sideways before hopping off. Anywhere you go, you’ll find rails, ropes, power lines, all of which you can ride on top of. Doing so guides you along the rail until you decide to jump off. These tricks truly redefine how Mario Kart is played. If you keep an eye out for them, you’ll always find opportunities in which you can take a ride along a rail to cut a corner or jump onto a wall and jump off to reach a higher path. It isn’t too tricky to master these techniques, but pulling them off is still insanely satisfying.

Previous Mario Kart games occasionally had sections where you would drive underwater. Besides the movement being floatier, it wasn’t too different from regular driving. Now, your kart or bike will convert into a watercraft and ride on top of the water. I find it to be a much more interesting change in gameplay. Similarly, certain ramps will cause your vehicle to glide like a plane for a short time. It’s functionally just like a more polished version of the gliders in previous games, but I appreciate the change in aesthetic.

The 30 courses this time around are really enjoyable. Some of my favorites include Cheep Cheep Falls, which involves boating down a windy river with waterfalls, and DK Spaceport, which pays homage to the original Donkey Kong arcade game. Many of the returning courses have been reworked to make great additions, too. One example is Choco Mountain, which has been reimagined to be a monster truck stadium.

The number of courses is very low compared to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but to make up for it is Mario Kart World’s biggest innovation—its massive open world. Every course is now located in one cohesive continent. There are all sorts of environments and roads connecting these courses, and most modes take advantage of the ability to travel between courses.

The first mode is Grand Prix. As always, each cup comprises four races. The higher you place in each race, the more points you’ll get, with your goal being to have the most points by the end. The first race in each cup is a familiar 3-lap race. All subsequent races, however, begin by traveling along roads until eventually reaching the next course. Once you reach the course, you’ll only do one lap before reaching the finish line. It’s a very jarring change to Mario Kart, and it certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Personally, I think it’s a welcome change to freshen up the series. It is unfortunate that there isn’t at least an option in this mode for all the races to be traditional 3-lap races. Speaking of options, you can choose an engine class of 50cc, 100cc, 150cc. Mirror Mode can be unlocked, but 200cc is completely absent. This is a bummer, but 150cc still feels very fast.

Next up is VS Race. You can race on any track in any order here. You can even choose whether you want to do 3-lap races or long treks from one course to another, like in Grand Prix. You do have some options to customize the races, such as being able to group players in up to four teams, but the options are more limited than in prior games. For example, you can only set the item pool to Normal or Frantic. Older games let you limit items to just Shells or Bob-ombs, for example.

The Time Trials mode also returns, and it is nearly identical to previous iterations. As always, you race in any of the tracks by yourself with three Mushrooms to use. You can also compete against times of Nintendo staff and other players, even viewing the “ghosts” of their characters during a trial.

Battle is back as well, but it is far more limited than in 8 Deluxe. The only types of battles to return are Balloon Battle and Coin Battle, as opposed to the five unique battle types in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. In Balloon Battle, your goal is to hit other players to score points and cause them to lose balloons. Losing all your balloons eliminates you from the match. At the end, surviving players rank based on their points, but eliminated players all tie for last place, which is a very bizarre way of handling scoring. In Coin Battle, your goal is to pick up the most coins by the end of the match. Hitting players with items causes them to drop coins. There are only eight arenas to battle on, which take place in various areas around the open world. Unfortunately, Battle is a disappointing shell of its appearance in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Having 24 players and the option for four teams is nice, but it doesn’t make up for the otherwise limited options available.

On top of the returning modes, there is one new major mode for racing, Knockout Tour. In this mode, you drive across the map in one extremely long race. These races are split into six checkpoints. After each checkpoint, the bottom four players are eliminated. This mode is extremely chaotic and intense, and it’s easily the highlight of the competitive modes. Unfortunately, there aren’t any options to customize the experience of this mode, besides changing the engine class. There are also only eight different rallies which follow different paths. A way of creating custom rallies would have gone a long way to adding replayability.

The final new mode is Free Roam. In this mode, you can simply explore the world to your heart’s content. You can just go on a joy ride around the world as you explore tracks, ride on roads alongside traffic, or find interesting landmarks. There are also three types of collectibles to find. P-Switches can be pressed, beginning a short challenge that may involve pulling off tricky maneuvers, collecting blue coins, or driving through obstacle courses. Peach Medallions are located in hidden and tough-to-reach spots. Finally, ? Panels are scattered around the areas surrounding tracks.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a reward for finding these collectibles—only stickers that can decorate your vehicle. However, discovering and completing these challenges felt like its own reward for me. What’s more annoying is that the game does not keep track of which collectibles you’ve discovered, besides ? Panels, and if there’s a P-Switch challenge you would like to replay, there is no way to easily find it. Despite these flaws, I have gotten so much enjoyment from just aimlessly driving, doing tricks, and finding random things. It’s probably where I spent most of my playtime!

These are the offerings for offline play. Most of these modes can be played on one system with up to four players, though Time Trial is single-player only, and Free Roam is limited to two players (though you strangely can only play this mode with two players through a wireless or online lobby). If you want to use multiple systems locally, you can also play wirelessly or through a secret LAN mode, but with none of my local friends owning a Switch 2, I was unable to test these modes.

Of course, there is also online support, in which up to 2 players on one system can play, but the options are incredibly limited. You can choose to participate in matchmade Knockout Tours, in which a random rally is picked. You can also play Battle, where either type of battle is picked randomly, and everyone votes on an arena. The final option for matchmaking is regular races. In a lobby, you can pick from three suggested tracks to vote on or vote for a random track. Once a race begins, it’s usually a drive from the previous track to the chosen course, but there is a rare chance for the race to be a traditional 3-lap race instead. Apparently, if a random track was selected, it used to be guaranteed to be a 3-lap race, but a recent update changed that, making 3-lap races even rarer. As I said earlier, I enjoy traveling between tracks, but for those who don’t, there really needs to be an option to just play races the way previous games handled them.

Along with playing with random players, you can also create private lobbies to play with friends, in which you have access to all the options you have offline, besides Grand Prix. There is no option to party up with friends while matchmaking, though. In my experience, online connections have been quite stable for Nintendo, with only a couple matches where a player seemed to ping around slightly. Interactions between players are also limited to short prewritten messages, so players can’t send anything inappropriate. Overall, the online play is a pretty huge step back from how it was implemented in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. In that game, you could create public tournaments with highly customizable rulesets, in which friends and strangers could play together.

The controls are mostly the same as older Mario Kart games. A is used to accelerate, B is used for breaking and going in reverse, R and ZR are used for drifting and jumping, and L and ZL are used for items. Y now opens a map in Free Roam, and the right stick can move the camera around. While the controls are fine, it is worth mentioning that the character-select screen displays each character’s costumes as separate characters. There are easily more than 100 characters and costumes combined, making it a little cumbersome to find who you’re looking for.

One thing that I absolutely cannot complain about, however, is the presentation. Mario Kart World looks phenomenal. There is so much personality, from the character expressions, to the way tires bend when charging a jump, to the cartoony explosions that spell out ‘KABOOM!’ The resolution appears to be 1440p, and the Switch 2’s power allows for a perfectly stable 60 frames per second with 1-2 players, which feels like a miracle for a Nintendo game with such a large world. However, if you have 3-4 players, the framerate is capped to 30 frames per second.

I also need to talk about the music! Similarly to Mario Kart 8, all the tracks have great sounding jazz and rock music. Even more impressive is the massive playlist of legacy Mario songs that can play at random. While exploring in Free Roam or traveling between tracks in a race, there are at least 200 covers of songs (though the number is likely higher) from games all throughout Mario’s history. Hearing beautiful covers of music from games like Super Mario Galaxy is easily one of the best aspects of the game. I daresay that this might just be the best soundtrack in a Mario game, and I can see myself listening to it while doing work for many years to come.

Thankfully, there isn’t a whole lot to worry about when it comes to moral issues. There is constant cartoon violence in the form of throwing shells at racers, getting caught in explosions, or getting squished, but nothing too bad. There are also skeletal and ghost-themed enemies that are represented as playable characters, hazards, an item, and a track. There is also an item resembling a crystal ball. Using it summons a wizard named Kamek, who temporarily transforms players into a random Mario enemy while creating hazards.

As the Switch 2’s flagship launch title, Mario Kart World is a great start to the system’s life. I am very glad to see so much innovation this time around. The new movement mechanics, open world, and Knockout Tour mode are incredibly fun, and they are complimented by a stellar soundtrack. And as usual, the game is very clean for a family-friendly experience. However, there is a glaring lack of customization and options for the various game modes, especially for online play.

There is also the problem of price. This is the first time Nintendo has priced a game at $80. For the longest time, Nintendo games have been $60, so despite how much fun I’ve had, this increase makes it difficult to recommend. Currently, there is a console bundle that includes Mario Kart World with the Switch 2 for only $50 extra. I would say that’s a fair price, but if you’re considering buying the game separately, I would wait for a significant sale, which is sadly quite rare with Nintendo.

-Tyler Ferguson