‘Mario Kart Tour’ is the worst way to play ‘Mario Kart’

“Mario Kart” is the king of kart games. It’s not up for debate. There’s just something magical about rounding that last turn of a Mushroom Kingdom racetrack while unloading your green shell behind you and watching Luigi give you a slow mo side-eye in the replay. The series has had its misses, sure, but on the whole “Mario Kart” is an extremely strong franchise. Recently, in a move meant to bolster their still-relatively-new mobile strategy, Nintendo decided they wanted to bring the classic racer to your phone. Well, in the technical sense they succeeded, you can sure play “Mario Kart” on your phone now, but “Mario Kart Tour” might not quite be the experience that hardcore fans were hoping for. 

Speaking of, I’m about as hardcore a “Mario Kart” fan as there is. I’m the guy that unlocks every kart, every track, every racer. I play more “Mario Kart” than anyone I know by far, so I went into this game really wanting to love it. Initially, when it wasn’t what I had dreamed, I had the opposite reaction. For my first few days with this game, I absolutely dreaded playing it. I felt like the controls were garbage-tier and there was just something about it that didn’t feel “right.” We’ll talk about it, but before we get into the bad, let’s start with the good. 

This game looks incredible. It’s the most beautiful kart racer on mobile bar none. The amount of tracks they brought to the game is incredible, including tons of classics like SNES Mario Circuit 1, GBA Bowser Castle 1, and of course SNES Rainbow Road just to name a few. The character selection is decent too, with over 35 characters to choose from and presumably more to come down the road. There doesn’t seem to be any restriction on how long you can play at a time before it forces you to either pay to continue or stop for the day (a favorite tactic of some other mobile publishers) and there are some pretty neat adjustments to the “Mario Kart” gameplay that serve to add some freshness as well.

Each character, kart, and glider you unlock can have different characteristics on different tracks. Some of them allow you to pick up three items at a time, some give you things like a points multiplier, but regardless, there’s an incentive to unlock them all. The way you do that is buy spending an in-game currency, Rubies, that you can earn as a daily log-in bonus, for completing races, or for reaching a certain tier in your weekly rankings. And yes, the unlocks are (brace yourself, internet) random. *shudders*

There’s been a lot of chatter about microtransactions in this game, but honestly, I don’t think they’re too egregious. They don’t affect gameplay whatsoever, it’s not “pay-to-win,” and realistically, like most microtransactions that seem to cause aneurysms across Reddit far and wide, they’re easily ignored. There’s also a $5 a month subscription service that will give you additional rewards for completing cups, but for the reasons I just stated above, I decided to ignore that too.

Unfortunately though, despite the interesting things about the game, it has some real issues. As much as it hurts my soul it’s time to talk about the negatives. First of all, the characters and karts all feel way too same-y. Large racers like Bowser have slightly slower acceleration and I guess the smaller characters have a slightly better turning radius (??) but if that’s even true, I promise you barely notice. Mostly because no matter what character, kart, and control scheme combination you use, the unfortunate truth is that the controls are at best mediocre and at worst awful. 

If you have any experience at all with modern “Mario Kart” games you’ll want to turn off steering assist immediately. It’s like having a psychopathic ghost pulling at your wheel in ways that almost never make sense or are helpful. I’d also strongly recommend against the “manual drift” mode. Really not sure what happened with this feature, but it’s worse than bad, especially if you’re trying to actually be competitive. You can use it with gyro controls as well, which might work better for some people, but as I’m not a gyro guy I just stuck with the normal steering, with assists off, and since I made that switch I’ve had a much easier time of it. Even on those settings, the controls aren’t great, but they’re at least passable. 

This is probably the biggest thing that starts to make this version of “Mario Kart” feel wrong. It’s not the “Mario Kart” I love, it’s an obviously lesser version. The options for really feeling like you’re actually pulling off something cool in a race just aren’t there. Either you’re turning and not really drifting or literally only drifting and never turning (what a weird choice, I can’t stress it enough. It’s bad.) Neither one of those options allow you to feel truly in control like you can in big boy “Mario Kart” and that’s why this one is so disappointing. It’s close, but not quite there. 

Ultimately, this game is fine and nothing more. But for a franchise like “Mario Kart” that so frequently delivers excellence, that’s pretty disappointing. The best part about it is that luckily, it’s totally free on Google Play and the App Store, so you don’t have to take my word for it, find out for yourself! For the extremely casual “Mario Kart” fan, maybe this game is everything you’ve ever wanted. If that sounds like you, let me know in the comments! As for me, I’m not sure if I’ll be spending too much more time with this game, but it’s still nice to know that if I’m ever really, really jonesing for a “Mario Kart” fix, a version is available, even if it’s not everything I ever wanted.