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The first problem MKW has is the speed management. Drifting feels slow, boosting feels slow, the game overall just feels... slow. You can go to any MKWII TT and analyze every move, every turn, and admire the skill required to have such finesse. In MKW, you're just watching people do the same things over and over with no real visual indicator of any sort of skill or speed, it's all just slow. It's a problem when a WR looks slow.

And that brings me to another, more personal problem I have with the game. The new parkour mechanics. This is the one new thing that got added to the game to add more depth to the racing, and they fumbled it so hard. Mario's about, like, jumping, right? Platforming? Why not just make faster sections of a track only possible if somebody uses their platforming skills really well in order to reward good execution and reproducibility? Why not have the player improve over time in order to learn the inner workings of this brand new, complex, deep system? Of course, they can't do that though because the "game is for kids", which is an entirely different debate I'm not going into. Im telling you though, they were sitting on a gold mine with this new platforming stuff, and yet, the new system that they added to induce speed and precision, is BARELY usable! It's often even slower than driving normally! In tracks that just stretch for miles with no walls, how are you supposed to shine through the sea of mundane? You aren't. The game doesn't encourage the new mechanics at all except for a couple, desperate and far apart attempts to have something to do in the game. If you've seen MKW, I bet you've seen the really cool Sky Garden Parkour Cut. Imagine now if EVERY track had that? How much optimization there'd be, how many levels it'd take to reach such a skillful conclusion? Instead, they brush off both speed, and precision, and force the players to dig for it in a bucket of scraps to piece together something that might as well not even exist.

Actually, I wanna talk more about the tracks. The layouts. Sure, they don't encourage speed at all, but that's not all. Most of the tracks are gatekept from you by acres and acres of land called "intermissions". Just, useless, boring, stretches of deserts, highways, and plains biomes. "This is where you use the items in Knockout!", "This is the fun of the game!", "It adds to the experience that it's a real world that you explore!". No, none of that. It's a SLOG. In MKWII, if you use a golden mushroom, the scale of the track would trick you into thinking that you're going faster than the game was even prepared to make you. in SMK, if you use a feather for a shortcut, you soar into the air, take a massive shortcut, and get a nice speed boost. Not only is the feather from SMK forth absolutely useless if not for battle mode(s), but the golden mushroom in MKW, due to the scale of the game, again, doesn't make you feel fast at all. The game is TOO big to feel fast. Whatever happened to the claustrophobia? The more enclosed, not necessarily eerie, but dangerous and compact spaces? Where you needed to, I don't know, drive well? Not in MKW, every player can fit on the track, with no bumping, and everybody gets insane crazy items for free! When everybody's comfortable, there's no growth, and with no growth, you can't even tell whether or not you're even good at the very game you play. What kind of Mario Kart isn't even the least bit skillful?

I could absolutely go on, and on, and on, and on and on and on about how not Mario Kart Mario Kart World is, but I would rather spend those 2 hours on something else. :P

Everything about this game sucks except for the visuals, and other menial things in a grand scheme.