re: UPDATED -SWITCH 2 HAS LAUNCHED!

quote:

---

But, just curious about what everyone thinks of the new Mario Kart?

---

I've put about 25 hours into it now and am a seasoned Mario Kart Player. I have played a lot of both regular races and knockout tour online...

The truth is... I don't like it... in its current form.

I think the base game has a lot of potential to be good in future patches/updates, but its not executed very well right now.

I feel the updated driving mechanics are excellent - the new drifting system is improved, drafting is better, and I like the concepts of charge jumping, rail riding, and wall jumping. The problem is that you never really get a chance to actually drive uninterrupted for very long to utilize these new mechanics.

I don't have a problem with 24 players, the issue is 24 players with 2 item slots. I preferred the Base Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for this reason - base had 1 item slot while Deluxe introduced a 2nd item slot which made races a lot more chaotic. Now double the number of racers, which doubles the number of items... its a mess.

Races have devolved into nothing more than a glorified slot machine, where your success or failure is determined on what items you can roll on the final lap. If you sandbag the first 2 laps and collect coins, and stay in the bottom 4 spots, you are guaranteed to finish in the Top 5 because all you have to do is get a golden mushroom to cut across major sections of the track and a bullet bill. It's so easy. But if you try to actually be in first place or anywhere near the front in the final lap, you are guaranteed to be blasted by an onslaught of items. It's a joke. I experimented over the weekend. I did 30 races by trying to front run, and 30 races sandbagging. I averaged 11.4th place frontrunning, and 4.8th place sandbagging. Of those 60 races I won 5 times and all 5 of them were the sandbag route. But overall its 99% luck 1% driving skill.

Knockout Tour is a fun mode and is slightly better, as once you get into the Top 12 it becomes more Mario Kart and less slot machine, but even then sandbagging is the optimal strategy. The worst place to be in Knockout Tour is 1st place. I had a race where I was in 1st and about to hit the 2nd to last checkpoint to enter the Top 4, and I got hit with lightning which caused me to lose my triple green shells protecting me and my horn, then got hit with a red shell, and then a blue shell over a gap which caused me to fall of course and I went from 1st to 8th and eliminated.

I get that its Mario Kart and not a pure racer and this is part of what Mario Kart is, but I feel like the developers here leaned way too much into the chaotic randomness aspect of Mario Kart in this edition. At least previous entries, it was still in the end more skill than luck. The best racers still won most of the time and there was some sense of progression. Getting blasted by items to cost you a win or a high final position was the exception not the norm, in this game is the norm. This game seems to be chaos for the sake of chaos and because of that its shallow without much depth. And the big Mario Kart Youtubers are all pretty much admitting this as well, many of them saying that the online races are simply too random and luck based.

Mario Kart is heading down the same path as Pokemon, a series which the single player has been ruined by making it too easy, too accessible, too casual and too beginner friendly.

Hopefully the developers can release future updates to make this game a little less luck based and add some kind of skill curve to it, because in its current state I could see the online and competitive scenes being abandoned quickly because the complete random nature of the races will get stale very quickly.

I didn't even mention the fact that a lot of things in past games were cut from this - such as online tournaments, stat tracking, renegade roundup (which would be perfect with 24 players) and Mario Kart TV. Since the intermissions were that important to the dev team that they force them upon us in the online Race mode, would it really have been that much of an ask to add, I don't know, an online grand prix mode where you race for points in a series of 4 races?

Interesting analysis.

I felt Mario Kart has been.more chaotic than anything for the last few releases. If, in a group of 8, you have 2 skilled racers and 6 non-skilled, regardless of the amount of items, it'd hard to finish in the top 3 through skill.

I played 8 online a lot initially, then I was seeing 3 blue shells a race and always 1 in the last lap. It was already better to sit in 3rd or 4th and wait to strike later. It was a slot machine if you could carry a set if red shells through lap two and be ready to strike.

It is more chaotic, but is it really THAT much different?

If there was a third spark level, that's news to me but I never played nearly as much MK-8 as I did other games on the Switch.