{"id":71183,"date":"2019-09-28T03:07:10","date_gmt":"2019-09-28T10:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/review-mario-kart-tour-is-a-simple-fun-racing-game-with-a-troubling-monetization-platform\/"},"modified":"2019-09-28T03:07:10","modified_gmt":"2019-09-28T10:07:10","slug":"review-mario-kart-tour-is-a-simple-fun-racing-game-with-a-troubling-monetization-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/review-mario-kart-tour-is-a-simple-fun-racing-game-with-a-troubling-monetization-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u2018Mario Kart Tour\u2019 is a simple, fun racing game with a troubling monetization platform"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(Nintendo Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was never a big fan of Mario Kart <\/em>on consoles, or racing games in general, so I was surprised by how much I initially liked Mario Kart Tour<\/em>. It\u2019s a simpler, more accessible free-to-play version of classic Mario Kart <\/em>racing, made for iOS and Android, and it works much better than I thought it would.<\/p>\n

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(Mario Kart Tour Screenshot)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Mario Kart Tour<\/em>, you play as one of an assortment of trademark characters from the Mario<\/em> series as they head out for a dangerous afternoon of go-karting. In Tour<\/em>, which features an assortment of tracks from across the long history of the series, your go-kart is always accelerating without your input. You\u2019re only left to steer, by swiping left and right, and to use any items you pick up by tapping the screen.<\/p>\n

The steering is a little \u201cfloaty,\u201d and I found myself doing a lot of accidental figure-S swerving until I figured it out, but I got there eventually. You\u2019re often better off doing as little as possible to guide your go-kart, as it\u2019s easy to overcorrect and end up out of control. As usual, the courses are full of alternate routes, sudden hazards, big jumps, ramps, and boost panels, along with the trademark arsenal of Mario Kart <\/em>items. It\u2019s a distillation of the classics, rather than any kind of innovation, and all in all, the game works.<\/p>\n

Writing about it on launch day, however, Mario Kart Tour <\/em>admittedly doesn\u2019t have much else going for it. A genuine multiplayer mode isn\u2019t in the game yet, so the only real way to compete online is to try to maximize your score and climb the leaderboards. Once you can actually race directly against your friends, I can imagine Tour <\/em>being one of the go-to time-killers on your phone, as it\u2019s designed for little two-minute bursts of gameplay.<\/p>\n

Mario Kart Tour <\/em>officially broke launch-day records<\/a> for mobile gaming yesterday, with 10.1 million downloads worldwide. This knocks Niantic\u2019s Pokemon Go <\/em>down to No. 2,<\/em> with 6.7 million downloads at launch, and more than doubles the day-one numbers for Mario\u2019s previous mobile adventure, Super Mario Run<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s particularly impressive considering that the initial rush to download Mario Kart Tour<\/em> crashed the game\u2019s servers<\/a>, so it took a few hours before anyone could actually play the game. Tour\u2019s <\/em>initial success can be attributed to both savvy marketing and name-brand appeal; Mario Kart <\/em>as a franchise is arguably the most unequivocally successful series in Nintendo\u2019s lineup, with more than 100 million units sold over the course of the last 27 years and no real weak spots in the core lineup.<\/p>\n

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(Nintendo Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All that having been said, Mario Kart Tour <\/em>is also woefully incomplete \u2014 for now, at least.<\/p>\n

As of right now, the only racing you can actually do in Mario Kart Tour <\/em>is progressing through the \u201cCups,\u201d batches of three tracks with a simple challenge at the end. Each race puts you up against a field of seven AI-controlled competitors, most of whom are basically brain-dead. There are three levels of competition available in the base game \u2014 50, 100, and 150cc \u2014 and I only got any degree of challenge from the last one. Even then, I was nonchalantly racking up first and second-place finishes without really trying. It started off entertaining despite that, but as I got further into the single-player racing circuit, it started to feel like a grind. (I almost said it was a drag, but that would\u2019ve been a racing pun.) There are other options for gameplay, but you have to burn through a full seven Cups \u2014 21 races and seven challenge stages \u2014 before you can unlock them.<\/p>\n

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(Mario Kart Tour screenshot)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That leads into the other real problem with Mario Kart Tour<\/em>: its monetization scheme. Like most free-to-play games, Mario Kart Tour <\/em>is set up to gently encourage you to put real money into it in a few different ways, none of which offer any particular value.<\/p>\n

The primary reason you might want to spend money on it is for Rubies, which are the game\u2019s premium currency. Most of the game\u2019s roster of characters, karts, and gliders are locked behind a \u201cgacha<\/a>\u201d system (named for \u201cblind box\u201d-style Japanese vending machines<\/a> for collectible toys), where you pay Rubies to get a random prize. While you can get Rubies for free just by playing the game, they\u2019re deliberately rare, in order to incentivize you to buy them from the in-game store.<\/p>\n

You can also get Coins by picking them up during races, or by earning a big stack of them as a prize for completing a Cup. They come in slowly from normal sources (you can count on nine or so from a typical race, when the cheapest items in the store cost 100), but you can also spend Rubies to play a minigame called Coin Rush, where you have a chance <\/em>to get a bunch of Coins at once. Coins can be spent in-game to unlock a limited, rotating assortment of goods, such as a new driver or kart.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re really <\/em>looking to go all in, you can opt to get a Gold Pass for $4.99 a month, which lets you take on special challenges for new rewards, display special Gold Badges to show off that you\u2019re paying for the game, or most irritatingly, unlock the 200cc races for Cups. There\u2019s an entire level of difficulty locked behind a subscription fee in Mario Kart Tour<\/em>, which I can only assume is why the first three levels are all so easy. You\u2019re supposed to pay out if you actually want to feel a sense of accomplishment when you play against the computer.<\/p>\n

The issue, of course, isn\u2019t that Nintendo wants to make some money off of their game. It\u2019s primarily that it doesn\u2019t offer the player a lot of value. You can\u2019t buy racers or karts directly unless they come up as part of a random rotation in the shop; otherwise, you\u2019ve got to drop Rubies to play an in-game slot machine with a hilariously low chance of paying out<\/a>. The Gold Pass is only really good for bragging rights, and the subscription costs the same as the recently-introduced Apple Arcade<\/a> or Play Pass<\/a>, which just underscores how little you actually get for your Gold Pass money.<\/p>\n

Mario Kart Tour <\/em>has a decent set of bones, but right now, all it really lets you do is race against easily-beaten AI competitors in order to slowly accumulate currency which you can\u2019t reliably spend on anything you might actually want, in order to entice you into spending real money, which you still <\/em>can\u2019t reliably spend. Buying Rubies for a slim chance to get the racers that I actually want<\/em> is basically the same as a lottery ticket, with similar odds.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a surprisingly naked cash grab, made doubly strange by the fact that this is Nintendo <\/em>we\u2019re talking about here. It has some of the smartest designers and most valuable characters on the planet. The company could\u2019ve held back for a while, launched Mario Kart Tour <\/em>with multiplayer, and steadily released more tracks and racers for a dollar a piece over the course of the next year or so. It would\u2019ve been a license to print money, especially if they\u2019d started bringing in obscure characters (Waluigi alone <\/em>would\u2019ve moved some units) or dipped into the Smash Brothers <\/em>roster.<\/p>\n

As it stands, there\u2019s a fun little racing game buried inside Mario Kart Tour<\/em>, but it\u2019s hidden beneath a heavy coat of microtransactions. It\u2019d feel cynical from a small-time indie company, but from Nintendo, it\u2019s borderline exploitative. It\u2019s worth downloading Mario Kart Tour <\/em>just to play around with it for a while, but it doesn\u2019t take long before it turns into a grind.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a chance Nintendo could turn this around once the multiplayer mode makes its debut, so this isn\u2019t a total loss, but right now, it\u2019s an overall disappointment. I started off thinking this would be the game that finally got me into Mario Kart<\/em>, but then I hit a paywall and my enthusiasm drained away.<\/p>\n

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(Nintendo Photo) I was never a big fan of Mario Kart on consoles, or racing games in general, so I was surprised by how much I initially liked Mario Kart Tour. It\u2019s a simpler, more accessible free-to-play version of classic Mario Kart racing, made for iOS and Android, and it works much better than I… Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":71184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games-media","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t