Reviews

Drives us up the wall and sets our hearts racing

Mario Kart 8 is the first Wii U game... Well we mean to say that it's the first of Nintendo's next generation that feels as though it needed the new console, and the new outlook that's come with it, to exist..

Super Mario 3D World was a sumptuous thing, so rich in cartoon terrain, built from such shapely HD parts that you felt as though a solid punch through the TV screen would land you arm-deep in cake-turf, but its playstyle came from any number of older sources, like 2013's most entertaining patchwork quilt. Nintendo Land used the GamePad to create events - both in-game and out - we couldn't possibly have had without that new round-edged circuit-brick, but its mini-game menagerie was born out of Wii-era thinking, prioritising moments over the solid experiences the developer's truly best at. This, however, feels like a release, a screaming, gleaming rush of impulses, improvements and innovations that producer, Hideki Konno, and his team seem to have been itching to introduce for years. From its looks to its approach to online interaction, even the refinements it makes to the series' signature style, Mario Kart 8 is a very new game for Nintendo. Let's get this out of the way: it's quite probably the best Mario Kart ever made, and it's certainly the best game on Wii U.

There's every chance you could come to that conclusion within a few scant prods at the A button. Press A to start, enter single player, choose Grand Prix mode, select the Mushroom Cup, choose a racer and their kart, see opening track Mario Kart Stadium appear, rippling with fanfare and fireworks, and, finally, press A to accelerate. What follows isn't the sedate test track we've come to expect from the opening course to each game, rather a rush of neon light, blacktop arcing away into a fizzing sky as drivers abandon their usual standoffish personas and career into one another, hoping for a boost. It's literally overwhelming. Almost every first-time driver we've played with has crashed catastrophically at least once because they were distracted by what was going on around them. The tracks, tightened after their unnecessary widening for Mario Kart Wii, buzz with activity almost constantly (not least because we're back up to 12-kart races, with the four grid spots jettisoned by Mario Kart 7 reintroduced), while the graphical boost the Wii U offers helps make backdrops almost as busy. Sunshine Airport's terminal boards glimmer with new departures (if you look closely enough, they're all trips to other tracks), themed adverts flicker by on the scuffed sidings of Toad Harbour, and you'll be fascinated by the shaky science of kart drifts carving out strings of marshmallowy cumulus during the course of Cloudtop Cruise.

Yet while those tracks act as the glitzy chassis Mario Kart 8 parades around, it's the dynamics of racing itself that feel like the fuel that pushes the new game feeling along. Drawing heavily on ideas from both Mario Kart Wii (hopping drifts, bikes, trick boosts) and 7 (transforming karts, a more precise handling style), it's a compromise at first glance, but in time-honoured style, the game only truly reveals itself when that glance becomes an hours-long stare. Drifts are now incredibly sensitive, moving from boost-building crescents into screeching scimitars, perfect for claiming a quick racing line, at a nudge of the left stick, and slipstreaming now only comes after seconds of close-quarters tailgating, making it as dangerous as it is useful. Outside of the racing itself, the return of bikes within MK7's weighty customisation menus raised some eyebrows, especially in our office, where using one in the old days became akin to war crimes. Luckily, Nintendo's rethought its style, actually helping offer the game a new-found extra layer of pre-race intrigue.

Bikes remain slightly quicker, but suffer so heavily in their ability to drift that they now require what amounts to a full course of violent driving lessons to master, while customisation can totally change how all vehicle-character pairings play out, meaning there's far less scope for finding the ultimate combos that plagued Wii's online modes. That's not even to mention the bikes' new mutant spawn, the quad, which is a tottering rule unto itself; a lot of work's been put into making every style viable. But it's anti-gravity, MK8's one major addition of its own, that really hammers home the game's new style. The ability to hit sections of the track - both compulsory and optional - and twist onto walls or ceilings always seemed like a concession to the game's bombastic new visual style, a nifty trick to allow those impossible bends. We hadn't considered that it would change how we raced.

Apart from some snazzy axel action that sees your wheels spinning up onto their sides, anti-gravity mode introduces Spin Turbo, a move that rewards kart-on-kart collisions with a spinning, cobalt boost. Seeing a crowded pack and pinballing between each one to move up four places isn't just a good feeling, it's a viable tactic in almost every track, retro or otherwise. It's that sense of a tactical approach that most explains how Mario Kart 8 differs from its predecessors. For the first time, it approaches becoming a true racing game, where every kart and corner is a new consideration that has to be made in an instant for fear of a humiliating lift from (a much speedier) Lakitu. That's not to say it's lost its literal fighting spirit. This is still a playable Wacky Races the majority of the time, but we've never felt as able to plan effectively ahead quite as well in an MK game before. That even extends to the fighting itself - items are as key to staying in that race now as they are for disrupting other people's.

While a single hit still makes all the difference, there are more options for defending yourself than ever before. Noting scattered track furniture can be essential to stopping relentless Red Shells, knowing to steer onto a jump instead of a straight can put paid to someone trying to wrap the dangerous, but mono-directional Boomerang around your exhaust, and the Super Horn is the best of all. A new item, it releases shockwaves that both judder surrounding racers away from you and destroys any item in its radius - even the (thankfully much rarer) Blue Shell. Getting the Horn (a phrase that never stops being funny) sparks off some spectacularly un-Mario Kart risk/reward thinking: do you think you can make it into first place without any other items, keeping it back for a rainy day (the rain itself being a shower of newly exploded Koopa shell parts), or do you use it to clear a path and hope that you don't get hit afterward?

That dangerous philosophy pops up throughout. Triple Mushrooms are still best kept for zipping across crippling corners, but they now rotate around the wielder like shells, giving others the chance to nip across the track and gobble one (they do eat them, right?), tailing an item behind you now means you can't pick up another, and every racer visually holds the item they've picked up, giving you fair warning of an upcoming Bob-omb blast. All of this makes for a brilliantly tangible sense of danger, and it results in a game where becoming better isn't a question of learning routes anymore, but situations - it's almost an action game at times. Frankly, there aren't many routes to learn as it is. Mario Kart's ditched its scenic, sneaky shortcuts almost entirely, presumably to stop players in the know from getting ahead on sheer memory, a necessary casualty of the more skill-focused game. Instead, you have hairy, right angle leaps onto Thwomp Ruins' crumbled columns, Water Park's trundling rollercoaster carriages, which offer a Spin Turbo for those able to slam into their wheels, and Dolphin Shoals' centrepiece: a giant eel, whose ridged spine offers a ton of slightly horrid trick points.

They're all opportunities to improve your standing through skill, rather than memorising holes that creep you past any difficulties, and while it's sad to see the returning N64's Royal Raceway lose its signature trip through Peach's palace, there's a very definite, and ultimately beneficial, reasoning behind that change. But what MK8 lacks in track trickery, it makes up for in sheer, glorious excess along their intended courses. After the fuzzy, washed-out pastels of Wii and the necessarily lo-fi look of the handheld version, it's wonderful to see the Mario Kart series embrace what it's never had before: genuine graphical grunt. In single and two-player, the 60-frames-per- second visuals sing, but three- and four-player's halved framerate hardly suffers, given what's on show. Characters and their karts have been brushed smooth after their jagged appearance on 3DS, each looking soft enough around the edges to be a plushie (except Metal Mario, who looks more like an executive paperweight), and many of the items have had enough work put in to make them seem like mini set-pieces - spewing a Fire Flower's payload down Bone Dry Dunes' darkened tunnel areas and watching it suddenly illuminate is a strangely primal pleasure. Fire good, indeed.

Among all of this, however, it's the tracks that have benefited most for the boost. Bowser's Castle quickly swaps its usual evil opulence for twisting steel constructions and boiling lava, complete with a gigantic version of the perennial final boss pummelling boost pads like a (massive) child in a tantrum. The Game Boy Advance edition of Mario Circuit has been augmented with an anti-grav corner more befitting of a funfair, jacked up 45 on huge hydraulics. These new tracks are an exercise in design mastery, not just in their presentation but their settings. These don't just look amazing, they feel it. Twisted Mansion turns Mario's Boo Houses into some Terry Gilliam-like dream sequence, with suspended pools of water and racers spinning onto and up undulating walls, the new edition of Rainbow Road sets its sickening twists across the architecture of a gigantic space station, the perfect setting for anti-grav loops and all-too Gravity-like tumbles into endless space, and the incredible Mount Wario is a single-lap downhill from a giant plane, onto off-piste slopes, across the face of a functioning dam and finally onto a true ski slalom, with all the sharp turns and brutal crashes that entails.

There's a thinking at work here that goes so far beyond most racing games that it would make you feel embarrassed for the competition were you not whooping your house down. Even the retro tracks get a taste of that imagination. The much-maligned N64 Rainbow Road returns as a magnificent single lap race across Christmassy skies - complete with a flying train dropping gifts of coins onto the shimmering surface. Toad's Turnpike is now a high-speed pursuit through an urbanised Mushroom Kingdom, improved with anti-grav wall-riding and a wonderfully hidden glider jump that lets you soar above most of the rest of the bustling track on your way. Even newer inclusions get a little love: the 3DS's Piranha Plant Pipeway now has an extended underwater, anti-gravity area that helps cluster the pack and force some more interesting interactions than its wide, empty middle section could before.

There are a few duds. Barring a couple of truly nasty blind corners, Sweet Sweet Canyon feels fairly flat among all this adventurous design, and the retro inclusions from Double Dash!!, Sherbert Land and Dry Dry Desert, seemingly couldn't be made interesting without altering them completely, but the 32 on offer easily manage to stand out as one of the most exciting rosters in the series and the likes of the waterfall-riding Shy Guy Falls and Mount Wario are destined to become classics in their own right. It would be extremely remiss of us not to mention the sound here, too - in keeping with the showy, high-definition presentation, Nintendo's gone big on the music, with much of the soundtrack played live. The hilariously over-the-top guitar licks of Bowser's Castle, a joyous full-band rendition of the classic Rainbow Road theme and the weird bit in the Thwomp Ruins ditty that sounds an awful lot like Sugarhill Gang's Apache (Jump On It) [maybe to your ears - Puzzled Ed] will become as much a part of the tracks for players as those utterly brilliant settings.

Sadly, with so much put into the meat of the game, it seems something had to be neglected a little along the way and in this case, it's Battle Mode. While the Wii version's battles failed to set the world on fire, this is somehow worse, failing to include any of the traditional arenas in favour of eight full tracks from the roster. It makes for a slow, often totally uneventful mode, as players spend most of their time trundling backwards along the duller stretches of Moo Moo Meadows, only to miss with a Green Shell and drive away into the wilderness again. The whole affair feels at odds with the rest of the game's immaculately thought-out races. But that's perhaps a measure of the core game's brilliance - you simply won't need more than this, particularly when you take into account the multiplayer options. Local multiplayer is as compelling as it has been since Double Dash!!: the tightened tracks and underhand tactics are about as perfect a way to get you jostling your sofa across the room in excitement and rage as we've seen for years. With all Nintendo's talk of the Wii U as a local multiplayer machine, it's quite incredible that the best one on it barely uses its brilliant tech.

But the lure of the eye-gossamer that is 60fps might well have you kicking your friends out and back to their own houses so that you can play online. Mario Kart's been paving the way for Nintendo's web concerns since the DS instalment and MK8 may finally have nailed the formula. There are now options for Global and Regional matchmaking, Friends-only play (with full lobby voice chat) and the return of Mario Kart 7's brilliant Communities mode as Tournaments - which can be customised not only in terms of race rules, but when ranking matches can take place and how often it returns, perfect for obsessives with Game Nights and a desperate need for empirical proof of their greatness. Add to that the ability to download friends' time trial ghosts or compete to be part of a stable of the world's top 10 players on each track and be turned into a global ghost, haunting everyone playing with your spooky talent, and it's about as in-depth as Nintendo's ever been with an online offering. While that's a relatively small achievement in the grand gaming scheme - and it will be months before we truly know how stable the service is, or how robustly the game's been built to stop the exploits that have plagued older games - the groundwork's been laid for an online game that could well destroy every real-world social tie we have. It's what we've always dreamed of.

That's not counting the amount of time we'll be spending outside of races. In the final marker of Mario Kart 8's (forgive us) Wii U-iness, Mario Kart TV is the most modern move Nintendo's made for years, a catch-all term for the new interactive highlights packages that appear at the end of every race and a menu screen that lets you watch recent and saved examples (watched by Miis who occasionally jump for joy, slump in sadness or look as though they're vomiting). MKTV allows you to auto-edit highlights to show key moments (drifts, hits or items are all included) and focus on specific racers, before generating a showreel that's often perfectly conceived (with the number of depth of field shifts and sudden reveals you'll see, the Wii U could now essentially be a competent slasher flick director) then giving you the option to upload it to Miiverse or YouTube. It's a supremely confident move, one that begs you and other viewers to find fault in what you've been given and trust us, you won't.

In fact, it's another way of seeing just how much has been stitched into the fabric of the game. We've watched highlights of friends managing a Fire Flower hit from half a track away, Wario chuckling as he overtook us into first place on the finishing line itself and Luigi looking terrified of everyone over and again, simply because noticing them in the highlights was the first time we'd seen them - with four people together, there's every chance you'll spend as much time watching yourselves back and cursing each other than you will playing. It's that confidence that encompasses everything here - Mario Kart 8 steps boldly out of the shadows of its predecessors, using their systems, ideas, even tracks, but adapting them to fit its own vision of a truly skilful game that people will obsess over, learning lines, kart set-ups and tricks, but never abandoning what it is people loved about the series. Perhaps calling it the first Wii U game isn't quite right: Mario Kart 8 is so far beyond its competition that it'll make you feel like you're playing a whole new console.