Mario Kart World's free roam needs to take the lead from Forza Horizon if it wants to win me over

The best racing games remember that all tracks you burn rubber on exist within context. It's what's made for some of the series' best courses, which is why I love that Mario Kart World is going all in with the approach. Whether it's the way a straightaway is designed on a racing circuit, or the angle of a corner in an urban track – there should always be the sense of intention that the decisions for a track's creation makes sense. It takes a lot for purely virtual tracks to convince, and that goes doubly-so when you're hurling shells with reckless abandon.

Which isn't to say Mario Kart World shouldn't feel fantastical. Just that, again, fantasy works best when it makes a bit of sense – that way, once you're immersed in a world the way it works can still feel intuitive rather than random. Mario Kart World's race courses are still quirky, strange, and over-the-top, but by placing them all within a shared larger space, the personality of each lap becomes clearer, and more self-evident in both how they're placed and how they relate to other courses.

Shrooming ahead

An interconnected landscape is a huge evolution for Mario Kart World, but it's not an idea that's completely out of left field. Certain courses in Mario Kart: Double Dash!! already explored the idea that tracks co-exist by allowing you to see landscapes from other courses in the distance. Daisy Cruiser, for example, can be seen out on the sea from Peach Beach. Likewise, you can see Mario Circuit from Mushroom Bridge, and Mushroom Bridge just outside of Mushroom City.

There, on GameCube, you got the sense that each track could lead into one another, and when playing All-Cup Tour – every race back-to-back – I used to imagine what it'd be like if you really could race from one track to the next seamlessly. Some of my favorite tracks, like Toad Turnpike and Moonview Highway, already challenge you to weave between on-the-road traffic.

That's exactly what Mario Kart World allows you to do. When one race is finished, you can continue to drive right to the next one, the roads between each track becoming home to extended driving chaos as you go head-to-head to continue. Knockout Tour leverages this further by making it one long, frantic race where 24-players are whittled down slowly by who is furthest behind. Learning the intricacies of the game world, from the courses themselves to everything that connects to them will help you learn how to stay in front, even if that means doing a bit of off-roading.

All the above is very cool, but what has me most excited to go pedal to the metal with the new entry once the Nintendo Switch 2 is launched (especially as it even comes as part of a bundle for some Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders) is the free roam mode. Tracks being connected is one thing when in the middle of race-time, but it's another to finally let us off the chain to chomp our way across a whole slice of Mario, vehicle in-tow.

It's in juggling these two elements that some of my favorite racing games really come into their element, the likes of the long-lived, much-loved Burnout Paradise and Forza Horizon 5 (and the rest of the series). Those games thrive on exploration, tasking you with finding bonuses that feed back into upgrading your rides as you poke around their expansive worlds. But the more you unfurl the worlds and look around, the more you innately expand your knowledge of how they slot together, so that when it comes to race time you feel familiar with the way roads intersect, how to take specific corners, and where you can save precious seconds.

There's still a lot we don't know about Mario Kart World's free roam mode, but we do know that like my other favorites there'll be plenty to explore beyond simply uncovering new shortcuts. I'm hoping that like those games there's plenty of reason to really dig deep into corners of the map to uncover collectibles, and to build your knowledge of these spaces between the courses – which will be vital as you race between them.

The only real question mark block at the moment is how important that space is going to feel to race through compared to the more designed, specific courses – which are closer in design to the Mario Kart tracks we know and love. What makes Burnout and Forza Horizon stand out is how integral the roads around the world are to the race experience moment to moment. The presence of the series' circuits as we know them suggests there will continue to be some delineation, but the urban tracks may very well feel more a part of the environment itself.

So far, in Knockout Tour especially, it seems like getting familiar with the world of, well, Mario Kart World will be a huge benefit to learning how to race through it. I'm hoping that this will finally be the moment where Mario Kart really comes out of its blue shell, ready to allow us to really get lost in a world of racing where our sense of discovery fuels me to improve lap after lap.

It's not just Mario hopping onto Nintendo Switch 2! Donkey Kong Bananza feels like a sequel to Super Mario Odyssey to me, and it couldn't be in better monkey paws.