Mario Kart 7

The multiplayer moments that Mario Kart games provide are always entertaining. It’s an ever-shifting chaos of flying shells and exploding items, but the secret is that it’s usually a controllable one. A rookie can take advantage of the speed boost and invulnerability of special stars to not finish in the last place, for example, while experienced players can break when they realize that someone has picked up a blue shell, letting the new first place take the fall. That is, they tend to be games that manage to entertain any type of player and always maintain a good level of competition. In this sense, Mario Kart 7 is a successful new entry that greatly expands the series’ ideas and mechanics while maintaining this core experience intact.

Mario Kart 7 brings a lot of new things to the table. Karts are now equipped with a glider, for example, which activates on scripted moments – usually, after we jump over a huge chasm – letting us “fly” for a while: the secret here is that we still have a few seconds of gliding left after the chasm ends and we return to the normal course, which allows us to pass over obstacles and sharp turns. This means that gliding is not only a satisfying change in how we momentarily control the vehicles – by adding verticality to the mix – but it also allows us to experiment with the level design, trying to create little shortcuts buy flying over things that would otherwise cost us precious time.

We can also now drive underwater, where a propeller pops up in the kart’s rear side, changing handling slightly: karts can become more sluggish to control, as their stats alter underwater. It’s a less profound change than gliding, but it still adds variety to the course design.

Mario Kart 7 also introduces vehicle customization. Now before each match, we can assemble a kart after choosing our character, choosing over a variety of wheels, bodies, and gliders, with each part having its own stats. On the one hand, this gives us the freedom to create fun combinations, such as leaving Bowser with a flowery glider inside Yoshi’s egg, or more optimal ones that better suit our strengths, focusing on speed or handling, for example. But on the other, such an option significantly diminishes the individuality of each character, since even with their initial stats, we can basically make them identical to each other with the correct pieces. But the trade-off is clearly worth it, as it adds a lot of experimentation to the mix, turning the prospect of unlocking new kart pieces into an exciting one.

The game also marks the return of coins, which disappeared after the GBA entry, and can have here a considerable impact on the strategy of a race, bringing an element of risk/reward to it: collecting them increases our overall speed – besides unlocking new kart parts –, which pushes us to sometimes go out of our way, risking losing some precious seconds, to collect more of them. And since getting hit by items, such as shells or bananas, makes us lose coins, we are constantly trying to acquire them throughout the whole race. Coins also improve the game’s balance, being the most common item given to players on the top spots in a race to leave them more open for attack: the coin offers them no protection against enemy shells.

The last additions are the ability to play by moving the 3DS and a first-person view, which the game never bothers to tell us is there. But it’s not that great of an addition, to be honest, and when our kart is hit the camera even returns momentarily to the third-person, possibly to avoid inducing motion-sickness.

Mario Kart 7, however, doesn’t mark the return of the mission mode of the DS entry, which extended the single-player part of the game and pushed players to engage with the tracks differently. If Mario Kart 7suffers from one major issue is precisely the lack of content: its many additions to the gameplay formula are excellent, but there are few modes to take full advantage of them – and a single-player campaign in the vein of Mario Kart DS could have helped with that.

But Mario Kart 7 doesn’t try to present any different game mode, being limited to the usual Grand Prix, Time Attack, and Battles. It even lacks the option to create a customizable cup, where we can usually choose the number and selection of tracks we want to race in. The bikes from the Wii entry are also nowhere to be seen and the number of racers has dropped from the Wii’s twelve back to the usual eight.

But to counterbalance that, the level design of the racing tracks on display here is top-notch, often merging theme and mechanics in creative ways. Music Park, for example, is a course built out of musical instruments. We race over keyboards, fall on drums that propel us upward, and even try to escape the impact of large musical notes that add to the soundscape. In Mario Kart 7, if we press the jump button the moment our kart is launched upwards, we gain a small but important turbo. Since the black keyboard keys, the drums, and even the impact of the musical notes all propel us upwards, Music Park gives us ample opportunity to explore this mechanic.

Even the selection of old racing tracks is great, bringing some of the most creative of their respective titles. From Mario Kart DS, we have Waluigi’s Pinball, a track built inside a pinball machine and full of prolonged curves, encouraging the use of drift. From the Wii entry, Coconut Mall is present, with its ramps that further punish players who get hit by items on the wrong one, making us wait for the right moment to throw our shells. And from Super Nintendo, one of the simplest but toughest Rainbow Roads of the series was selected, driving players crazy with its 90º turns.

Several of these courses have also been adjusted to accommodate the new mechanics. Coconut Mall, for example, has the initial escalators replaced by ramps with shiny arrows indicating their direction: if on the Wii it was not uncommon to figure out which one was rising and which was descending too late, onn the 3DS smaller screen, this would have been impossible. But not all changes are for the better. The great pipe in Koopa Cave from Mario Kart Wii, for example, is now flooded to add an underwater section, which ends up eliminating its main attraction: in the original version, a small stream of water at its center increased the speed of vehicles, encouraging us to stay on it while avoiding our opponents’ shells and some laser beams. Now… it’s just an underwater section like any other.

The new items, however, are all-around great additions. The Super Leaf, for example, fits in perfectly with the series’ chaotic ethos, giving us a tail that can not only attack adversaries but also protect us from their shells. But the main change here is regarding the infamous Blue Shell, which still hits whoever is in first place, but now travels on the ground, also hitting anyone unfortunate enough to be on its way. Since the blue shell is usually given to players who are last in a race, this means that the item is now actually useful to them besides ruining the party of whoever is winning the race.

Mario Kart’s foundations have always been solid, but Mario Kart 7 further expands them while offering a great selection of racing tracks. But if it definitely improves on the core gameplay, turning it more complex and varied, it also forgets to do something more with it besides the basic.

December 04, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 12, 2015.