It's also a great disappointment.
FIrst, I want to talk about the anti gravity gimmick. It's pretty cool, but poorly implemented. When I first heard about it, I couldn't stop thinking about the possibilities, but every second idea was for Rainbow Road. Here you have a race track suspended in the air above the atmosphere, just begging to be turned into a multicolored möbius strip of death. Instead? They took all the magic away and turned into a spaceship-themed track. Yuck.
They made only ONE möbius strip track, and it's a "circuit" track with trees and bushes on both sides. Seriously. Upside down trees. It's horrible. Almost every track that features anti gravity segments turns the scenery around as well, so you get no sense of defying gravity.
Also, very rarely is it used for running along walls, and even more rare is racing on the actual ceiling. Instead they tacked it on (in the last minute, it seems) to a few steep hills or sharp curves where normal karts would have done just right.
One thing that bothers me too is bikes, they look so weird in anti-gravity that I always use karts.
Here's a few more missed opportunities:
- Turning a few SNES tracks into möbius strips, or fold the entire track so half of it is now the ceiling.
- Anti gravity mayhem in the Wii's half-pipes. Turn a few of them into actual pipes.
- Steep climbs when weaker vehicles slow down, followed by steep drops where you speed up uncontrollably. Shy guy falls does this, but it needs to happen more often.
- More straight tracks. In MK7 there were several tracks, including Rainbow Road, where there were no laps. In MK8 there is only one that I can remember. How cool would it be for a track to start in a series of underground water-filled tunnels, then climb along a gigantic beanstalk beyond the clouds?
- Loop-de-loops! Not a single one!
- A three-sided möbius track where each side is one lap. Technically, it's only one side but you get my drift.
Online play is still a bit of a pain. You still have to open "rooms" and hope your friends show up. What if your friends are offline or playing with random players? Not my problem!
The entire experience until you get to race is pretty bad too. The navigating through menus is insufferable, especially if more than player is present.
Finally, the game is pretty hostile towards the gamepad. Why force the game into split-screen mode for a two-player race when there's two screens? How about a spectator mode where the player uses the gamepad screen and others can watch from a third-person perspective on the big screen?
Hopefully the last few concerns can be patched, and even though the unimaginative track design is inexcusable, I would gladly pay for a couple extra DLC "cups". I know the game will get patched for Amiibo support, so get to it Nintendo! Make it perfect!
