Mario Kart 8 review: One step forward, one step back - Ars Technica

Great visuals and course design marred by some baffling changes for the worse.

Developer: NintendoPublisher: NintendoPlatform: Wii URelease Date: May 30, 2014Price: $60Links: Official Web site

It's too easy to dismiss the Mario Kart series as a past-its-prime throwback that's holding Nintendo back, a family friendly nostalgia-fest that becomes more of a pale echo of the company's golden era with each passing year. I'd argue instead that Nintendo has done a great job keeping the franchise fresh over the years, adding enough new ideas and tweaks to the solid core with each release to make Mario Kart a must-play rite of passage for each new piece of Nintendo hardware. Sure, some games in the series have been more revolutionary than others, but Mario Kart games are far from the phoned in, more-of-the-same, semi-annual sequels that they could be.

Mario Kart 8 keeps this pattern going for the, um, eighth time, providing a deceptively solid racer beneath its candy-colored exterior. The changes might be relatively slight this time around, and some of the alterations have bafflingly made things worse, but all in all, this is still the kind of game that gets people to buy Nintendo consoles.

The most striking improvement this time around, truth be told, might just be the HD graphics. That might seem like an odd thing to stress as a vital new feature for a series in 2014, but loading up the game for the first time, it's easy to wonder how the series got by without the increased resolution for this long.

It's a credit to Nintendo's visual design chops that games like 2008's Mario Kart Wii didn't look completely awful for the time with just 480 lines of vertical resolution. Without that limitation this time around, though, the designers have really been able to go to town. Mario Kart 8 fills each course with a cavalcade of rich colors and crisp incidental details and runs everything at a silky-smooth frame rate even during split screen matches. Some courses skirt the edge of looking a little too visually busy, but overall this is the kind of fantastical wonderland you may have dreamed about diving into when playing the original Super Mario Kart oh so long ago.

As far as the gameplay, the major new twist this time around is the addition of "hover-kart" racing sections that allow most tracks to twist in corkscrews, swoop in dramatic upward and downward arcs, or turn at dramatic sharp angles without much notice. Your ride automatically transforms into a special hover-mode when the course requires it, though the actual mechanics of racing change very little, whether you're on solid asphalt or racing along the side of a brick wall. Oddly enough, hover-karts go into a brief, weird spinning dash when they bump into each other or into special posts dotted throughout the track. It's a confusing new feature that comes with an annoying lack of control.

The hover-mode does allow for some crazy course extensions into the third dimension, though for the most part it's hard to fully appreciate these crazy twists and turns during the race itself. With the camera remaining welded solidly behind your kart the whole time (and tilted only slightly from normal flat racing), driving with your kart at some weird angle to gravity feels a whole lot like driving with the wheels appropriately pointed toward the original "ground."

The developers take pains to make these sections a bit more exciting—forcing players to drive up a waterfall, for instance, or looping a track around so what used to be a retaining wall becomes an orthogonal raceway later in the lap—but for the most part it feels a bit forced. The primary exception is when the hover-mechanic is used to allow for optional shortcuts, letting racers dodge up walls to avoid hazards and find speed boosts and items.

Aside from the hover gimmickry, the 16 new courses in the game follow the series' reputation for quality. Each one features plenty of unique twists that make each course feel fresh and packs in plenty of well-hidden shortcuts and secrets.

The new Bowser's Castle is a particular standout, featuring a gigantic stone statue that rains down fiery blows on different portions of the track, but practically every track has some grin-inducing bit of incidental design. Whether it's driving alongside dolphins in a clear blue sea, dropping down stairs that light up and play noise as you progress, leaping over a cable car with a well-timed jump, landing on the wing of an airplane and power-sliding through the expansive cabin, or taking an extra-long, single lap race down an ever-changing snowy mountain course, there isn't a single new course that isn't memorable in some way.

Most every item you can name from previous Mario Kart games is here, from offensive staples like shells to the screen-obscuring squid ink introduced in Mario Kart DS (oddly enough, the explosive fake item block first introduced in Mario Kart 64 is now absent). The most important returning item may be the coins that litter the course, which have been mostly absent in home console Mario Kart games since the original. Rolling over up to ten of these coins grants incremental boosts to top speed, while getting hit spews a few of those collected coins across the course to be picked up later. Effective coin management can be a crucial difference in a close race, and being forced to aim for the coins littering the tracks adds some crucial positioning strategy to laps that might otherwise feel a bit repetitive.

The handful of new items are a mixed bag; my favorite is the boomerang, which can hit unsuspecting opponents as it returns to you or allow for another attempt after a miss. The giant piranha plant item can automatically snap at opponents and coins as you speed by, giving you a small boost with each lunge. I was less interested in a new speaker-box item that causes a shockwave in the immediate area surrounding your kart, but it is notable as the only item that can actually nullify an incoming blue shell when you are in first place.

Speaking of the blue shell, this is as good a time as any to talk about that scourge of the skillful and the great white hope of the novice: rubber banding. Like every previous Mario Kart game, MK8 does give a leg up to players who are lagging behind in the standings, primarily by giving trailing racers much better items that allow them a chance to catch up (previous games have also given computer opponents an incremental speed boost when they are behind, but this effect seems less pronounced this time around).

There's nothing more frustrating for Mario Kart players than to be cruising along with a solid lead, only to be hit by a shrinking lightning bolt, followed immediately by a red or blue shell, followed by a starman-equipped competitor that knocks them right off the course without a chance to recover. These situations do still happen in Mario Kart 8, but they definitely felt less frequent than they were in Mario Kart Wii, which may have been the zenith of rubber-banding ridiculousness.

I don't have any hard statistics on this or anything, but anecdotally, I managed to get through many more first-place laps (and sometimes entire races) without being waylaid by a blue shell in Mario Kart 8. Red shells are also easier to escape this time around; a quick power slide dash or zig zag pattern is often enough to lose their slow-moving homing signal when it appears on your tail.

That's not to say the game is forgiving. Well, it is forgiving in the 50cc difficulty—so forgiving that even complete racing game neophytes will be able to stay competitive without ever letting go of the accelerator. The 100cc mode is slightly more competitive, but will pose little challenge to anyone who is experienced with racing games and power-sliding around turns to get those boost-inducing blue and red sparks.

It's the 150cc mode that remains absolutely merciless. The slightest mistake on a turn here is usually enough to drop you back at least one position (and often more) as item-equipped opponents unleash their payload on you. If you're not exploiting every shortcut and grabbing every boost, it's tough to finish in first. Yet even when you fail in this mode, it's more often than not your own mistake that opened you up to the retribution, not simple luck of the item draw from your opponents.

Mario Kart 8 might be the first Mario Kart game that's actually as notable for what it takes away as for what it adds to the experience. The most notable omission is the lack of dedicated courses for the fan-favorite battle mode. Instead of placing battling players in specially designed, tightly enclosed spaces, battle mode now takes place on a small selection of existing courses from the Grand Prix mode. Up to 12 players start out at spread out positions on these courses and have to track each other down through the same sets of rough patches, turns, and jumps that were designed for racing rather than chasing and killing.

In previous Mario Kart battle modes, there were plentiful opportunities to corner or cut off opponents with skillful positioning and control of key points on the map. In Mario Kart 8's race course battle mode, you more often end up trying to chase down opponents that are just out of range as they gleefully ignore your presence and continue down the winding track. Or you'll struggle to hop in place to turn around on the narrow tracks to face an opponent coming at you from the rear. This one baffling change is enough to make the new battle mode frustrating, rhythmless, and random enough to be easily ignored.

Another change affects the way items work for the worse. In every Mario Kart game since 64, you've been able to hold down a button to trail many items behind you defensively. You can still do that in Mario Kart 8, but now you can't collect a new item while holding your current item behind you (or while making use of an automatic shield of rotating bananas or shells). This might seem like a small change, but it actually has a huge effect on strategy and makes it much harder to churn through a lot of items during a race. On the plus side, this might play into the relative lack of item-based cheapness on the part of the computer-controlled karts.

Motorcycles make a return after their introduction in Mario Kart Wii but are much more limited this time around. In the Wii game, skillful players could go into a wheelie on demand, improving their speed but reducing turning ability and increasing the slowdown from bumping other racers. That key ability has been completely removed from Mario Kart 8, removing one of the most skillful portions of the last game and making bikes into simply tighter-turning versions of their four-wheeled brethren.

Players can make use of a new class of all-terrain vehicles as well, but they feel practically indistinguishable from karts. There are a bevy of unlockable characters and vehicle customization options to choose from as well, but from a gameplay perspective most are practically identical to others in the same tier, trading high top speed for low acceleration and worse handling (or vice versa).

There's an online mode available to replace the soon-to-depart online modes in the DS and Wii Mario Kart titles, and it worked just fine in our pre-release tests (who knows if that will hold up when the servers are in launch mode). However, it's almost unfathomable that, in 2014, it's impossible to chat with other players during an online Mario Kart race. Even if every player is on your friend list, voice chat is limited to a Mii-packed lobby between races. Some colleagues and I had to resort to nearby laptops with Skype to enjoy each others' screams of frustration and joy during our tests. There's also a new mode that allows players to share and view highlights from favorite races online, but it includes precious few options to edit these clips beyond the limited automatic timing and camera angle choices made by the game.

Mario Kart 8 also brings back the ability to control your kart using the motion-sensing features of the GamePad or Wii Remote (plus the optional Wii Wheel). The GamePad is a bit too heavy and unwieldy to do this comfortably for extended periods of time, and the Wii Remote is a bit too finicky for precision lines on those tough turns (though the Wii Wheel actually helps a bit with this).

Fortunately, Nintendo has added the option to use a Wii Remote as an NES-style digital controller this time around, which works surprisingly well if you don't have a Nunchuk or Pro Controller around for extra players. Unfortunately, players have to wait for a race to start and then go into the pause menu to change the default tilt-control setting for Remote users every single time they start a new game.

That's just bad design.

All in all, these missing features and changes for the worse are disappointing blemishes on what is still an incredibly enjoyable game. Mario Kart 8 isn't the best game in the series, but it adds enough new visual, gameplay, and track design flourishes to its well-trodden core kart-racing gameplay to be worth a look.

Verdict: Buy it.

Listing image: Nintendo