By Isabella Purdy Staff Writer
Mario Kart World Tour finally came out on Sept. 25th to a huge amount of people trying to download it at once, resulting in the game crashing. The next day, many Barons could be seen playing the mobile game at lunch, in class, and just about everywhere else.
Even though the trailer teased old favorites returning like Waluigi Pinball and Rainbow Road, the first New York Tour features mostly 3DS courses revamped for mobile. There are a total of 12 courses for Mario Kart, which seems like a lot, but when you factor in the 16 different courses people can play, it gets old fast.
But, the lack of variety isn’t Mario Kart’s biggest issue. Monetization and micro transactions is. In order to unlock the 200CC class, you must get the gold pass which while you can use for free for 2 weeks, you must pay for past that amount of time.
The gold pass has many exclusive things you can get like premium karts, gliders, and characters but ultimately is very pricey. The main currency for the game, rubies, certainly doesn’t help this issue either. Rubies are used to shoot off a pipe that can potentially get you legendary characters, karts, and gliders.
Players must either save their rubies for a whopping total of 45 rubies to fire off the pipe ten times, or give in and pay $26.99 to get enough to hopefully give you the character you want. Placing in tiers high enough to get the ruby reward is difficult to do, with people seemingly having an impossible score for the four courses in the race that is impossible to achieve without dropping some cash.
In addition, multiplayer mode is non existent and will be added in a future update. You cannot race your friends as of right now, which is one of the main highlights of the Mario Kart series and what made it so successful.
Players currently play against CCP’s and don’t have any additional mini games to play like Balloon Battle and Shine Runners. There are Bonus Challenges instead, and there is no direct tutorial for drift mode, which is difficult to manage on your own without help.
One of the most annoying features is the barriers. In the original series if you didn’t stay within the boundaries, you’d fall off of the cliff, or road, or just right into space. Here, this is impossible and teachers players that you can just hit the side of the barrier and still stay in the race with no consequences.
While Mario Kart World Tour is the new craze at FVHS, it is far from perfect. If you want the true Mario Kart experience, play the 2005 DS version or one of the deluxe versions on the Switch for the experience you deserve as a fan.
