Mario Kart World's new gameplay showcase puts a lot of focus on the game's Tony Hawk-style rail-grinding mechanic, and in doing so proves it's more than just a slick gimmick.
When I first saw Mario Kart World racers hopping onto rails and pulling off li'l spinny tricks, I figured that was about the size of it. At best, I thought, it was a cute but impractical mechanic that would give you a little speed boost that may or may not compensate for the slight deviation in your path to the finish line, but after watching today's Treehouse livestream, it seems rail-grinding is much more central to the game's meta than I had initially thought.
Kicking off Day 1 of Nintendo's Switch 2 Treehouse: Live is a Mario Kart World presentation where the hosts of the stream play a few rounds of the game and showcase some of its features. The host playing the game frequently uses rails on the edges of roads to take shortcuts around the map, and at one point even appears to dodge a blue shell, which are historically indiscriminate and unavoidable killing machines.
You can also build up boosts, which is to be expected, but there's also a pretty neat trick where you jump from the rail to a nearby wall for what appears to be some sort of bonus boost. There are also ramps scattered around some maps that let you jump up to power lines and rail-grind on those as well, though it's unclear what specific benefits you get by doing that beyond just looking really cool.
At one point, there's a part of a track with a bunch of giant barrels rolling toward you that look pretty tricky to dodge, but you can just hop onto the rails on either side of them and boost your way right past them.
Most notably, there seem to be shortcuts built into Mario Kart World's maps that are only accessible via rail-grinding and wall-riding, and at one point in the stream you can clearly see the player character overtaking the Donkey Kong in front of him by utilizing one of these alternate routes.
"You can really see how those rails change your path every course, and you can do something different every time," says the host introduced as Sam, who's playing the game.
"It opens up so many possibilities," adds Kendra.
I'm excited to see for myself how the rail-grinding mechanic adds variety to Mario Kart World's gameplay, but the real selling point is the new open world format, which puts all of the game's map in one interconnected world that you have to navigate. For our Mario Kart World preview, GR's Rollin Bishop got to go hands on with the new Switch 2 racer and said it "might truly be the system seller Nintendo Switch 2 needs."
For the first time since Super Mario Kart 33 years ago, Mario Kart World brings the feather back to actual races and it seems like it can even stop the dreaded blue shell.
