The Nintendo Switch 2 is here and with it comes its flagship title, Mario Kart World. It’s an interesting choice for the main launch title. Usually there’s an epic adventure, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Twilight Princess for their respective consoles. But Mario Kart reaches such a giant audience. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is by far the highest selling game on the original Switch, so leading with a new game in the series absolutely makes sense. Is this game enough to carry the launch of a new console?

Mario Kart World’s big new gimmick is right there in the title, it’s the world. Every track exists in one big open world. When you’re playing the main modes, like Grand Prix and Knockout Tour, you don’t really get a chance to explore that open world, but the connection is clear. When Nintendo first began talking about the game, they would mention how you now had to drive between each course in a Grand Prix. I didn’t really understand what that meant. Were you going to have to wait for people to stop exploring and get to the next race? But, I get it now.

Basically, the path from one course to the next is now part of the race. The first course in each Grand Prix is a standard three lap race. But after that, you drive on the roads towards the next course. Instead of three laps, you hit two or three checkpoints on the way over and then do a single lap around the new course. It works really well and keeps things more interesting.

While on these drives between courses, you’ll sometimes pass a Yoshi’s restaurant. If you go through the drive through, you’ll get a food pickup, which unlocks new costumes for the character you’re currently playing. This is fun, although I wonder if, after all costumes are unlocked, if it’ll just feel kind of pointless. You do still get a nice speed boost if you don’t have a new costume to unlock, so that’s something at least.

The Grand Prix mode is great fun, I ended up playing through all of the 50CC races in the first night, but it’s not anything too new. However, there’s a few new modes that change a lot. The most fun one, in my opinion, is the Knockout Tour. This is a battle royale mode, where twenty-four racers race through a massive tour from one end of the world to the other having to pass check points. If you aren’t doing well enough, you’ll be eliminated at the checkpoints. For example, the first checkpoint requires you to be at least in twentieth place in order to continue. This is a ton of fun online and leads to some really intense moments. I have yet to win one online, although I did hit second place and that felt really good.

The other big new mode is free roam. Because this is a big open world, you can just drive around and explore as you’d like. While doing this, you can stop and take pictures with a pretty robust picture mode. There’s also challenges you can find, called P Switch Missions, which are triggered when you, of course, hit a classic Mario P Switch. These are fast challenges that are fun to complete, like having to drive up a wall through a ring in a short amount of time. You can immediately start a failed challenge over, which does make them pretty addicting. Unfortunately, I’m not really sure if doing these challenges lead to a whole lot. I might just have to poke around with it some more.

There’s also a battle mode, but I didn’t spend a ton of time with it. It doesn’t seem like a lot of other people are either. Getting into a Knockout Tour match takes no time at all, but battle mode I found myself waiting forever until the game finally just starts without a full group. It’s the same battle mode that’s been around since the SNES, and it’s still fun, but it’s definitely not the draw.

Mario Kart World is both an excellent launch title and a great new entry in the Mario Kart series. I’m going to keep going with single player Grand Prix modes as well as Knockout Tour. I’ll also keep poking at the free roam mode, hopefully to get a little bit more out of it. If you like Mario Kart but weren’t sure how you’d feel about the changes to the series, I think you’ll be more than happy with what’s here.