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My first thought upon starting up Donkey Kong Bananza was, “Why yes, I actually would like to go ape shit.” The game starts by having Donkey Kong smash through a wall to reveal a glittering gem waiting to be liberated from the rock. But instead of punching the bright yellow gem into bite-size pieces, I kept punching through the walls and floors, digging tunnels into the landscape.
With the Nintendo Switch 2 finally out in consumers’ hands for more than a month now and the luster of the console’s newness fading, we’re left asking, “What’s this thing actually capable of?”
l sequels have to live up to their predecessors in some form, but few have as daunting a task as Mario Kart World. It’s a follow-up to the best-selling game across Nintendo’s last two console generations, and a game that eventually doubled in size thanks to an ambitious array of downloadable add-ons. So instead of following Mario Kart 8 with another release that simply adds more, Nintendo shifted in a slightly different direction. Mario Kart World is still Mario Kart; it has a daunting Rainbow Road to speed across and frustrating blue shells to steal victories away from you. But it also introduces an open-world structure that makes the game feel larger and more cohesive. This makes it the ideal game to show off what the Switch 2 is capable of at launch.
The biggest change for World is its structure. In all past Mario Kart games, racetracks were discrete entities. Baby Park and Bowser’s Castle had nothing to do with each other. But for World, the entirety of the game takes place on a singular landmass with different areas and biomes, like the map in Fortnite. And because of this, everything is connected. When you race through Grand Prix mode, you go through four tracks that cut a specific path through the continent, one following the other.
At first, this gave me a sense that the tracks were less distinct and singular, because they bled into one another. At the start of the Choco Mountain track, for instance, you start out in the quaint green fields of Moo Moo Meadows, because that course comes before it.
