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Game Essentials: Mario Kart Tour
Mario Kart Tour
Race around the world!
Nintendo’s legendary racing series is not just playable on your iPhone and iPad, it has been retooled so that it’s perfect for play with one hand.
Make no mistake, this is a proper Mario Kart game. It has the high-speed chaos and carnage you’d expect, plus a roster of tracks you’ll know from previous incarnations of this wildly popular series.
But importantly, it has a whole bunch of new features that make Mario Kart Tour feel like a daily destination—it is alive, and constantly evolving.
It’s not just because you’re racing against players all around the world. We’ve already seen New York, Paris, and Tokyo-themed courses and characters, on top of seasonal themes, such as Halloween. And as the weeks and months pass, there’ll be more and more cities and themes added into the mix. There’s even been the addition of the brilliant landscape mode and a new control layout.
That constant stream of new tracks, characters and themes make Tour a different kind of Mario Kart game. And there’s the tweaked controls to consider too.
One-thumb input makes Mario Kart Tour all about drifting—perhaps moreso than any other title in the series. You should be able to nail the technique pretty quickly: just turn into a corner and keep holding your thumb down on screen to keep sliding and watch the sparks fly. Now you’re drifting.
While you’re in this state, you can adjust the angle of the drift to keep it going as long as you can—the longer you drift, the bigger the boost when you lift your finger from the screen. You even see which level of boost you’ll trigger from the colour of the sparks spilling out from under your kart—from blue to yellow to pink.
Looking for more ways to gain an advantage? Tuck yourself in behind an opponent to trigger a Slipstream Boost, or aim for logs and geysers in the scenery to get a satisfying Jump Boost when you land. Oh, and at the start of each race, don’t forget to hold your thumb down as soon as you see the “2”—you’ll get a boost right from the start.
There’s more to think about before each race too. The mix-and-match character and kart system means that certain characters are better suited to their “home” courses. Pick Yoshi at Rock Rock Mountain, for example, and you get an extra item slot. And selecting an optimal kart and glider before a race will boost your score and extend your combo time, respectively.
But this is just the start—you’ll learn how and when to use all of the classic Mario Kart weapons, snaffle up coins, and unlock new characters and content in a bunch of different ways.
Mario Kart Tour is perfectly pitched on iPhone and iPad. It’s a living, breathing kart racer bursting with character, rich in subtle detail, and—most importantly—ridiculously fun to play. App Store games don’t get more essential than this.