Tag:

Roam

Six Awesome Things To Do In Free Roam

Six Awesome Things To Do In Free Roam

by admin June 18, 2025

An open-world Mario Kart is something few of us would’ve expected to see before the launch of the Switch 2. But with the introduction of Free Roam mode in Mario Kart World, which has everything you would see in a regular open-world title, like random challenges, hidden collectibles, and the vastness of the world around you, there’s so much more to do in this classic kart-racing series.

Princess Peach’s Leading Role And More New Releases

The open-world is especially nice when you don’t want to race anybody or just want to take a break from focusing on speed in general. Here are six things you can do while you’re driving all over the Mario Kart World map.

Collect and unlock new outfits

Screenshot: Nintendo / Cristina Alexander / Kotaku

There are outfits littered around every race track in Mario Kart World, allowing you to build wardrobes for every character.. Each outfit is tied to certain foods packed into smiling lunch bags called Dash Food sitting outside of Yoshi’s restaurants. Sometimes, Dash Food can also be found on top of pickup trucks with ramps. Dash Food works similarly to Mushrooms, too: In addition to changing your appearance, you’ll get a speed boost.

However, not everyone who eats the same food item will unlock the same outfit. For example, if you’re racing as Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy or Yoshi and you pick up a burger, you’ll get the Touring outfit. If you’re playing as Bowser, Wario or Waluigi, the burger will trigger the Biker outfit. Eat cake while you’re playing as any of the eight aforementioned characters plus Toad and Koopa and you’ll be wearing the Pro Racer outfit, but do so with Donkey Kong and you’ll get the All-Terrain outfit.

Complete challenges

Screenshot: Nintendo / Cristina Alexander / Kotaku

While driving around the world map, you’ll come across the giant blue P-Switches that are found either on the side of the road or are lying somewhere off-road. Running over those switches can trigger challenges for you to complete within the time allotted, be it in 15 seconds or, at most, 30 seconds.

Read More: Mario Kart WorldIs More Fun When You’re Grinding Rails And Riding Walls

Most challenges give you an opportunity to sharpen your wall-riding skills and enemy evasion techniques. Others will test your timing on using certain items, like the Feather, which allows you to jump up to five feet in the air to reach high places and avoid incoming projectiles. You can replay the challenges as many times as you want to beat your record if you so desire.

Rack up coins

Screenshot: Nintendo / Cristina Alexander / Kotaku

For the hustlers out there, you can find piles of coins hidden in every nook and cranny of the tracks. Keep your eyes peeled behind Yoshi’s restaurants, on top of billboards, in bushes, atop hilltops, and on boardwalks, just to name a few places.

Coin piles vary in size, from a stack of five coins to a money bag’s worth of 100 coins (or more). Don’t be surprised if you see a small stack of coins every once in a while. No matter what the size of the coin pile, they all add up to unlocking more new karts and other sweet rewards, like stickers.

Find Question Mark panels

Screenshot: Nintendo / Cristina Alexander / Kotaku

Each track has five Question Mark (“?”) panels hidden in various places. The panels don’t exactly do much when you run over them except give you new stickers to put on your karts. These are fun to collect.

And if you want an extra challenge: Activating 10 ? panels, is one of the ways to unlock Mirror Mode, which lets you race a track backwards.

Collect Peach medallions

Screenshot: Nintendo / Cristina Alexander / Kotaku

If you love collecting foreign coins in the real world, you’ll love collecting Peach Medallions. They’re basically giant coins that have a beautiful silhouette of Princess Peach’s profile engraved on them. They’re mostly found in high-rise places, like construction rails, musical blocks, thin columns, and aerial loops that you need to fly through. You can also find them in places you least expect, like a little islet beside the raging sea.

Peach Medallions are more like talismans than medallions because they lack a chain, but they’re medallions nonetheless. Unlike stocking up on rare coins IRL, collecting 10 of Peach’s coins will also unlock Mirror Mode.

Just take a relaxing drive!

Screenshot: Nintendo / Cristina Alexander / Kotaku

Free Roam is perfect if you want to take a break from races and party battles with other players. Go for a relaxing road trip around the world and forget about the worries of the world. No races, no battles, no challenges–just you, your vehicle of choice, and the wide open road to help you take in the sights and sounds of every track you visit and the people you meet along the way–just like a real-life road trip would do.

You can also park somewhere to take a picture of yourself with Photo Mode. Like many other games, this feature lets you customize your character’s expressions and poses as they sit by the sunset, the mountains, the beach, or any breathtaking locale you take them. Those pictures will make great wallpapers for your PC or phone later on. Just make sure you remove the control guides before you snap any pics.

.

June 18, 2025 0 comments

Mario Kart World Review - Roam If You Want To

Mario Kart World Review – Roam If You Want To

by admin June 10, 2025

For some family and friend groups, Mario Kart is an institution – a foundational memory of competition, silliness, and fun that has endured for decades of new tracks, racers, and games. That reputation for entertainment is at no risk of being lost by the arrival of Mario Kart World, which offers tons of thrilling and bonkers courses, an intense awareness of adrenaline-fueled speed, and the best feeling controls to date. It’s also true that this new Mario Kart stumbles in some important ways as it tries to expand its scope, especially with a lackluster freeroam experience. Even with some missed opportunities to excel, the charm and vibrancy of the franchise holds up and ensures the Switch 2 launch includes an approachable and exciting racer that everyone can enjoy together.

Whether dashing through the Grand Prix or new endurance-style Knockout Tours, trying to win the day in a massive 24-player online scrum, or shouting at your family in a four-player local race down Rainbow Road, the driving of Mario Kart has never felt better. Physics are more nuanced and precise, including a much-improved approach to gliding and flight. Techniques like rocket start and drift are now even more core competencies than before, and new tricks like charge jump or rewind give you increased utility to navigate a course. Riding rails, charting shortcuts, and smart item usage (including fun additions like the hammer toss) are essential to have any chance in the cutthroat online races, but also in the elevated challenge of single-player races, which feel much more difficult now on higher CC settings.

Beyond the great driving feel, it’s the various courses that steal the show. Each location offers surprises, from sudden rocketing ascents to crashing down into a wave-wracked sea. The tracks exist as hotspots in a larger open world, so players are rewarded with greatly increased variety not only by racing the tracks, but the designated paths between the many linked destinations. The colorful characters and endless obstacles give you a real sense of touring across a Mario-themed landscape where all these unusual characters and monsters somehow coexist.

Graphics, audio, and production values are all also exceptionally high. The characters exhibit charming facial expressions, even if the cartoony vibe on some characters feels almost overexaggerated, and the game world is detailed and vast. A high frame rate and gorgeously detailed environments combine to lend a surprisingly intense perception of speed. Music in Mario Kart games has sometimes veered into annoyance, especially on those sped-up final laps, but I found the varied tunes of this installment to be toe-tapping and highly listenable.

Mario Kart World’s biggest innovation is, unfortunately, also its biggest letdown. The free roam option lets you dash about the open world, find some scattered one-off missions, and seek out hidden items. I quite like the interconnection between tracks and the intimation of a bigger game world, but the actual implementation of this open space is lacking. The large areas don’t feel curated to be a compelling open world. Too few activities pop up to justify the wandering. The map is only accessible from the frontend, so it’s easy to lose a sense of place. And rewards are profoundly lackluster and uninteresting, usually amounting to yet another sticker for the side of your kart. It’s all quite underwhelming, especially when stacked against numerous other open-world racers in the market that include more robust discovery and varied gameplay.

The other alternative to racing is also substandard. The “Battle” modes, Balloon Battle and Coin Runners, feel limited in depth and too clumsy to be enjoyable. After some hours trying to find the fun, I was happy to return to the race lines.

It’s those races that have always been the source of the real fun, and that remains the case here. I found far more joy playing solo than I have in prior Mario Kart installments, as the increased arsenal of tricks and compelling course designs demanded more focused attention. And multiplayer remains a chaotic and nail-biting good time. In all cases, you must accustom yourself to the wild and sometimes random swings between leading the pack in 1st place, and a sudden single blue shell that completely craters your win – it’s the nature of this particular beast, and that randomness might frustrate some players. Embrace that unruly element of luck, and Mario Kart World produces a lot of laughs and memorable moments.

While Mario Kart World doesn’t earn high marks across the board, it has it where it counts. As a launch title for Nintendo’s new system, this is a friendly and approachable release that will delight all members of the family, while also offering a high skill and knowledge ceiling for dedicated players who want to dig deep. And it’s just as maddening and hilarious as ever to hit your buddy with a shell and watch him spin out. At the end of the day, isn’t that the point?

June 10, 2025 0 comments

I don't know how good Mario Kart World's Free Roam actually is, but it's perfect for me

I don’t know how good Mario Kart World’s Free Roam actually is, but it’s perfect for me

by admin June 10, 2025

A caveat here first, explaining why my thoughts on this are probably irrelevant, and then some thoughts on this. Caveat: I don’t think I’ve ever truly loved Mario Kart since one magical evening at university in which a bunch of us played Mario Kart 64, then newly released, on split-screen all night long and into the morning. I loved that game so much – each moment was such a hectic joy. And it used me up a bit. I haven’t really been able to engage with the series with quite the same thrill since.

I appreciate that makes me a terrible person, and an idiot, since I gather Mario Kart 8 is a game for the ages. (The last Mario Kart I properly got to know, incidentally, was the GBA version, so again, please feel free to write off everything I’m about to say.) Anyway, I fired up World and played a few races, and they were pretty and imaginative and gently non-thrilling to me, and I thought again: what’s wrong with me, idiot? Everybody loves this. Why don’t you?

Then I dropped into Free Roam and suddenly? Well, suddenly I was genuinely in love.

Here’s a look at Mario Kart World.Watch on YouTube

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how good Free Roam genuinely is, but I do know it’s absolutely perfect for me and all my personal weirdnesses. Free Roam positions every Mario Kart track on a kind of open world, with lots of gaps and spaces between them so you can just take off and do whatever you like. You ride around, brush up against tracks, lose your way, skate down the back of a dinosaur, rush through a few temples and generally zone out.

Does it feel like Mario Kart? Kind of. But what it really feels like is that special moment I love in an open world game when the campaign is done, and the map is pretty much cleared out of big ticket things to do. But you don’t want to stop playing, so you just groove around, a podcast on, and take pleasure in movement, the surroundings, and any final stuff you’re mopping up. Free Roam in Mario Kart gives you P buttons to track down, for example, each of which fires up a tiny micro-mission. All great. But also great if you don’t find them. It’s fun just to be here, moving and having very little going on in your brain. A landscape of movement, not monument, to quote the great Reyner Banham.

Mario Kart World. | Image credit: Nintendo

There’s more, though. Photo mode is absolutely fabulous. You can pause the action, bring up camera options, move in on a frozen image, tilt the camera, change the player’s expression and do all sorts of weird jazz like that. I have already spent at least two hours just doing this – finding a Banzai Bill, say, and trying to get the most terrifying and dynamic picture of it, blasting past a billboard and trying to make it all look a bit like Jet Set Radio. I enter a new area and a buffalo hops past or birds scatter and I try to catch it all. You could play this Mario Kart exactly as if you’re a wildlife photographer and it would still be great. In fact, I think I probably will.

And here’s the other thing. Mario Kart World is made for Nintendo’s GameChat, in which a prod of the C button – a free service until 31st March 2026, after which it will require that you have an online sub even if you only play F2P multiplayer games – drops you into video chat with your pals, allowing you to play together, drop in and out of games and stick together and generally hang together. It’s wonderfully agnostic about activities, and after setting it up – a welcome bit of security, given the nature of the thing – I was soon chatting to my friend Stu while we played Mario Kart World, together, not together etc.

Mario Kart World. | Image credit: Nintendo

Here is the glory of GameChat, a thing which I thought initially I would not like at all. Stu is an old friend of mine and when it comes to Nintendo games we go way, way back. But he’s moved away, we’ve both had children, we both have jobs (sort of, in my case) and life, as Becky Hill says, has been lifing.

But for an hour this morning we noodled through Mario Kart together and I heard about his new passion for making pizzas, his new pizza oven, his new stamp for making his own pizza boxes, the way he makes his dough. We talked about everything in exactly the way we struggle to do on a phonecall, because we’re both tail-end of Gen X and hate the phone almost as much as Millennials do. If I get to meet up with Stu every few weeks as we play Mario Kart or whatever? I will be very happy.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more we did talk about Mario Kart, too. Because Mario Kart World tells you almost nothing before you start. When I first launched it and saw there was pretty much no tutorial I thought: well, it’s Mario Kart innit? Immediacy is key. But then I started to play Free Roam, and I started to talk to Stu and compare notes, and I feel like Nintendo has applied a bit of Dark Souls thinking to Mario Kart.

Mario Kart World. | Image credit: Nintendo

Just a little. Amongst the many things Stu taught me was that turbo hop you can do by holding down a button and waiting for the sparks and I could have found out about that in the manual. Fine. But then he also talked about how he had been unlocking things, and told me a dazzlingly complex story about travelling between in-game food trucks scattered about various areas.

Then, spoiler, he told me about a UFO on the map, and I told him about a time I got stuck in a boat for a bit and genuinely didn’t have a clue what was going on. GameChat allows you to explore the kinds of secret-filled games that you really need a lunch break to talk about in the real world. It reminded me of coffee with Simon Parkin when he talked about the first Demon’s Souls, or, going back even further, it reminded me of discussing strategies for Impossible Mission on the C64 in my primary school playground before the bell rang.

All that, and it’s so lovely to hear that Stu is really into making pizzas now.

A copy of Mario Kart World was provided by Nintendo.

June 10, 2025 0 comments