Mario Kart is a game that a lot of people grew up with, but would that product fly on mobile? Mario Kart Tours is the product of that idea. Whether or not it was a good idea is another question.
In a Nutshell
Overall Score: 3.0 out of 5.0
Pros:
- great graphics when on high setting
- decent menus and overall user interface
Cons:
- can't play with friends in real time
- steering is clunky
Overview
Super Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo created a new genre of racing games, released in 1992. Drawing from the Super Mario Bros. franchise, players race around colourful tracks and attack each other with randomized weapons in a bid to become first place. Mario Kart Tour is the mobile phone iteration of the series, and is a simplified version of the console games. Players race with others in real-time, and try to rank higher in both global and friend circle leader boards.
Graphics and Aesthetics
The main appeal, at least visually, of the Mario Bros. characters, is their adorable simplicity and rounded shapes. This is true in their mobile phone form. The characters kept the look of the Nintendo Switch reincarnations and rendered them in the mobile screen. Tracks in the game look as colourful and appealing as they do in console, as well, with the aerial preview before the start of the race providing a beautiful sight. The menus look clean and free of sharp angles, giving the menu buttons a safe, innocent feel.
This is all true only on high settings though. Switch to battery saving settings, and textures become pixelated on the characters, their models become rougher. Map textures look as if they were done in Microsoft Paint and imported into a game. Even the menus get affected, albeit in a minor fashion, by their change in size and position.
Gameplay and Mechanics
The mechanics are quite simple. Drag left or right to steer, tap the screen to use a power-up, drag down to fire the power-up backwards. As is tradition in power-up racing, you drive into boxes containing a power-up, and a roulette of possible items to use appears. Whatever the roulette stops on is what you get to utilize. These power-ups either aid you or sabotage your opponents in your bid to become first place.
There are other smaller mechanics at play in this game. Coins are an example. Gathering coins increases your maximum kart speed. If you get hit by an opponent's power-up, you not only lose your momentum, you lose some of these coins as well. Another useful mechanic is the rocket start, where you hold your press during the countdown to get a small boost at the start of the race. There is also a probability-based mechanic where if you get a set of three items, you get a frenzy mode, which is essentially the star power in the classic games. It gives you a speed boost and invulnerability for a short period of time.
Steering can be customized a bit. You can choose to have a steering guidance, or to drift instead of turning. There is also the option of gyro steering, where you turn your phone to steer. Personally, I am satisfied with these customization options, as there isn't much in the way of control. The steering guidance seems negligible, and I felt no real difference with it on or off. Gyro steering is a bit useless, as if you turn your phone, you lose orientation and the phone doesn't keep your screen upright. Choosing to drift instead of turning makes it incredibly difficult to control your turns, since there is no real way to control the degree of your drift. As a result, driving the kart feels wonky and heavy.
There are many maps, and learning where to turn and maximize your route does take a bit of trial and error, but at least you can't fall off the map like you can in the games on console. This is probably for the best, and is probably done to make up for the lacklustre steering capability of the platform. Rainbow Road, for example, would be a deathzone for every player with the amount of times I've witnessed other players run into its invisible walls.
Content
There is not much in the way of content either, at least at the time of writing this post. There are quite a few maps, but they are rotated in the circuit with not much variation between them, if any. Karts, drivers, and gliders are available through the gacha system, which cost rubies, a currency that you can purchase with real-world money. The rubies can be awarded from random presents that are given when the account levels up.
It looks like the developers do plan on implementing a real-time racing mode with your friends in the future, but at this time it wasn't possible, limiting the playability of the game. The addition of that mode could make the game more enjoyable in the future, but for now Mario Kart Tour remains to be a glorified gacha game.
Final Thoughts
This game gets a middling 3 out of 5.
There is nothing inherently bad about Mario Kart Tour, but at the same time, there isn't anything that great either. The controls are so simplistic that it takes any enjoyment out of the game, and there is a lack of features that could hold interest. In the future, the game could be more appealing in general, but as of release, the game is a stalled car on the racetrack.
That's really all for this game. Thanks for reading!
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