Mario Kart World Is So Complicated That It Has a Rewind Feature

Mario Kart has a reputation for being a rather simple racing game: You collect and fire power-ups, aim for boost pads, and sometimes drift. If you’re driving at 200cc pace, then you occasionally have to tap the brake button. That’s about it. And that’s not to say that Mario Kart isn’t challenging to play well; it’s historically been one of those easy-to-pick-up/hard-to-master-type experiences. Some people are unbelievably good at it, of course. But Mario Kart World, due to launch with the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5, looks considerably more complicated, so much so that Nintendo’s implemented a Rewind feature like Forza Horizon has.

Nintendo shared more information on World during a specific Direct stream on Thursday. If you love MK, you’ve either already watched it by now or should check out the reel in its entirety; it covers everything from tracks to characters to modes. Yes, this’ll be a sprawling game, one that will delight the most obsessive Nintendo fans who will no doubt recognize that one minor enemy from Yoshi’s Island, or that level melody from Super Mario Land. That’s not me. Instead, what caught my eye were all the new mechanics built into the gameplay.

For one, there’s a new Charge Jump ability that works by holding the drift button while driving straight ahead. That starts sending up flames from your tires, just like what happens when you drift. When you let go, you jump and get a little boost. Simple enough, though it’s hard to imagine super try-hards not just doing this repeatedly all of the time (real ones remember snaking in Mario Kart DS), unless there’s some kind of speed penalty in place, maybe pre-jump. We’ll have to see.

Anyway, you can Charge Jump over obstacles and onto rails now, because grinding is another extra layer of complexity that World is bringing to the old-school Mario Kart formula. Time it right, and you might even dodge an incoming turtle shell. But what’s even wilder is that if you Charge Jump toward a wall, you’ll ride it. Some tracks in Mario Kart 8 offered limited opportunities to wall ride, accessed via boost ramps. World‘s mechanic, though, looks to be much more open-ended. It seems like if you see a surface, you can drive on it.

In this Direct, we got a glimpse at a particularly skilled player (at about 9:50 in the embed above) linking together a string of perfectly timed drifts, jumps, grinds, and wall rides to reach shortcuts above the track, inaccessible to the average player. In such moments, the game honestly resembles Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater more than Mario Kart. And that’s part of the reason the Rewind feature will be so critical, because it’s going to require plenty of practice to really memorize the optimal path through a course. It’s only a matter of time before we see the best players cutting massive sections of track entirely to record impossibly short lap times.

As someone who was first introduced to Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64 in the ’90s, all of this sounds way too complicated to me, like building a house mid-firefight in Fortnite. Kids will probably love it. And while that Rewind feature will be a valuable tool to learn the ropes, don’t think it’ll allow you to correct all of your mistakes in races, because other competitors will continue at normal speed in forward motion while you rewind, like in the SSX reboot from 13 years ago. (13 years! My god.)

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to eventually giving World a try, though probably not on launch day. If you’re a longtime Mario Kart fan, what do you think of all of these changes? Let me know in the comments.

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