Mario Kart World

Has the Mushroom Kingdom ever made sense as a coherent world? Certainly that's never been the priority of Nintendo's designers over the previous decades, laying its foundations over various series, genres and generations. So it's a joyous surprise to drive from one end of World's incarnation and discover how natural it all feels to have this place, these places, presented as a single landmass.

- 

Starting out from Peach's castle and heading north, the pastoral flats begin to sprout rocky terrain and then signs of industry: pylons, railways, green-pipe bridges. By the time we've crossed the river, the skies have begun to darken with clouds of volcanic ash - a literal foreshadowing of the lava colossus of Bowser that looms, spitting fireballs, over his castle. Equally, we might have wandered east, past the Edo shrines of Cheep Cheep Falls and Donkey Kong's ski resort - a nod, presumably, to Tropical Freeze — through the surf to land at the gargantuan shipwreck where Wario seems to have installed himself as a pirate king.

Whatever route we take, we don't notice any seams between one biome (which feels like a strange word to apply to a Mario game) and the next. It's tempting to draw parallels with Forza Horizon, where you can motor from the Lake District onto Edinburgh high streets via the Uffington White Horse without any sense of geographic dissonance, but that comparison might mislead on the role this game's open world serves.

At this point, it's worth noting how you access Mario Kart World's Free Roam Mode. The start menu is dominated by big chunky buttons offering singleplayer and a variety of multiplayer options (local, online, wireless play), each leading on to the usual offerings: Grand Prix, Versus, Battle, and so on. You'd be forgiven for missing the prompt, tucked in the bottom-right corner, to tap the pause button. This sets up an excellent presentational flourish, as the screensaver-style video playing in the background is revealed to be live footage, and you're dropped into the driving seat to take over. But it also speaks to the marginal nature of Free Roam.