One of the biggest games coming to Nintendo Switch 2 is Mario Kart World, the next generation of kart racer and the first wholly new game in the series for over a decade, with huge free-roam racing at its core.
Mario Kart World will be launching exclusively for the Nintendo Switch 2, and it’s a launch title coming out on 5th June 2025 alongside the console – it’s also included in a game bundle, which is sure to be very popular.
Having been teased during the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware reveal back in January, Nintendo has now confirmed a lot of the rumour and speculation over the game.
Mario Kart World will now support up to 24-player races, doubling the player count from Mario Kart 8 and before. Additionally, there’s much larger and more ambitious maps and locales, bringing in new elements such as filling stations – first spotted as a Yoshi-branded motorway filling station in the January teaser. There was also DK Pass, a jungle setting, what looks like a Wario circuit, a haunted one and more. We’ll dive into this as soon as we can. Racing will span the globe, with changing time of day and weather to change the atmosphere.
You’ll take on sequences of 4 races in a cup, but there’s also new Knockout Tour that joins up race circuits as you race from one side of the map to the other, with elimination if you’re too low in the rankings, and a full free roam mode to just go off-piste as much as you want.
There’s plenty more teases in the trailer, including rail grinding and wall jumping, and some new power ups including giant mode, throwable hammers, a multi-hit coin block and more. You can even commandeer some world vehicles. Separately, you can seemingly eat food which gives some costume transformations. That adds a little bit of cuteness to the photo mode you can use in free roam mode.
More details will be revealed in a Mario Kart World Direct is coming on 17th April 2025.
Elsewhere we got a much better look at the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware. The new console builds on the familiar design and features of the Nintendo Switch, a hybrid console that can be used handheld, on TV or propped up on a tabletop, but that form has been evolved. The screen is larger, the Joy-Con have a new connection style, and there’s some new functionality as well.
