Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Booster Track Pass – Test, Racing Game
42% and 48+48
It’s completely absurd: There are around 111 million Switch consoles in the world – and almost 47 million Switch copies of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe have been sold. 42% of all Switch owners have the almost perfect fun racer in their game collection. For a game that – unlike Tetris or Wii Sports – didn’t come bundled with hardware, that’s pretty incredible; all other games can only dream of such a software-to-hardware ratio! Superlative No. 2: The beefed-up Wii U port boasted 48 racetracks right from the start, for the pros among you: 25 of them were new, 23 were classic courses. Five years after the switch release, the offer is simply doubled. doubled! In a total of six rounds, 48 additional courses will be brought to the skiers, starting with the “1st wave” on March 18th of this year, which included eight slopes. On Friday, August 5th, the second crusher rolls onto the Mario Kart coast – on board are seven classic tracks and one brand new track.
Would be funny in the real Big Apple: Link races through New York City on a scooter.
How Mario Kart 8 plays, the potential for forging friendships or endangering the fun racer – you probably already know that or you can read about it in our switch test. So we get straight to the Gumba’s core, the eight courses: The Beet Cup includes the New York Speedway (from MK Tour), Mario’s Track 3 (from Super MK), the Kalimari Desert (from MK 64) and the Waluigi pinball machine (from MK DS). The Propeller Cup, in turn, includes the Sydney Jaunt (from MK Tour), Snowland (from MK Super Circuit), Mushroom Canyon (from MK Wii) and the fresh, sugar-coated track, Ice Cream Escapade. Already for the individual review?
total average
Wild, colourful, fun: The casino series from the DS is one of the highlights of the second DLC package.
New York Speedway is visually pleasing and subtly reminiscent of Toad’s Autobahn from the N64 days – a solid racetrack with a few nice shortcuts, but nothing more. In terms of layout, Mario’s Piste 3, like many SNES courses, is of course quite sober and the look has remained true to the other 16-bit classics – but at the same time the circuit is also a really good racetrack with motorsport vibes and a tricky hairpin. The Kalimari Desert wasn’t one of my favorites in the great Mario Kart 64 because it was so long. The new edition is not one of the prettiest courses, but of course it has a few special features with the train crossings and the section where the locomotive rushes towards you – and it’s less stretchy than in ’97. The showpiece of the beet cup is the Waluigi pinball machine – optically there is the full fairground casino broadside and playfully both dirty curves and a central chaos field with a wrecking ball.
The Kalimari Desert is from the Nintendo 64 era. In terms of ground textures, even more would have been possible on Switch.
The Sydney jaunt is the second runway from the mobile phone episode in this second wave – very few gamers should be happy about that, after all it is by far the least popular part of the series. I really like the look of this Australian course and the variety is also good. On the other hand, I don’t warm up to the snowy land: the reinterpretation of the GBA route is annoying with slippery hairpin bends, and the crumpled penguins don’t help there either. My heart (and my kart), on the other hand, jumps full of joy in the mushroom gorge: The circuit looks extremely charming and whirls you and the overall classification on the mushroom bouncers wonderfully mixed up – of course, frustration is possible there, but great fun too. Last but not least, the ice cream escapade goes all the way towards sugar shock – I like the sweet surroundings visually, but in terms of play, the short slope and the steep anti-gravity turns don’t tear me off my stool.
Full of calories: Ice Cream Escapade sends you through the curves in anti-gravity mode.
How to get the fresh courses? By purchasing the booster route pass for 24.99 euros or as a subscriber to “a membership for Nintendo Switch Online + expansion pack” – as Nintendo has given this subscription model its most bureaucratic name. Unfortunately, the waves are not available as individual purchases. Since the end of March, “the tracks also appear in the random selection when you race with someone globally or regionally” – Nintendo lets us know. Conveniently, the plumber group then also says: “The race tracks of the booster track pass can be driven locally or online in friends and teammates’ races, even if only one player has the booster track pass.”
Reference-www.4players.de