Nintendo Switch 2 hands-on: First impressions of Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza

After Wednesday morning’s explosive Nintendo Direct livestream dedicated to Switch 2, I got a chance to spend several hours playing some of the games that will bless the new Nintendo console after it launches on June 5. It may not surprise you to hear that the biggest ones from Nintendo itself all seem kind of awesome.

Namely, the two most notable games I played were Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong: Bananza. The latter isn’t a launch game, but they both made strong first impressions – not only as games themselves, but also as demonstrations of what the Switch 2 can do. Let’s dig in.

Mario Kart World is going to take over the world

I totally understand if you’re completely out on Mario Kart World, at least initially, because of the $80 price tag. It’s a lot to swallow considering we only just started getting $70 games a few years ago. I can’t necessarily defend or explain the price tag right now, but I can say that after doing a handful of races across multiple modes, World has the potential to be an unbelievably cool entry in the Mario Kart canon.

The big story here is that it’s set in a large, seamless open world. This seems to affect every part of the game, as even the traditional Grand Prix mode (in which racers compete across four tracks with a winner declared after all four races are done) has been overhauled to include parts where you have to drive from the end of one track to the beginning of the next.

There is no reprieve from racing, except for in a free-roam mode that I didn’t get to try. Races have been expanded from 12 drivers to 24, increasing the amount of on-screen chaos by a great deal.

As far as I’m concerned, the main attraction is Knockout Tour, an elimination-based mode that has players race each other from one end of the continent to another. Along the way, there will be five or six checkpoints with a placement number displayed on it. If you drive across a checkpoint that says “16” while you’re in 17th place, the race ends for you while everyone else keeps going.

This is kind of a classic mode in several other racing games, but it’s new to Mario Kart and plays very nicely with the sort of Cannonball Run mentality of hoofing it from one end of the world to the other. Knockout races are longer than your average Mario Kart race, but that just adds to the stakes as you keep going and get closer and closer to the end. I haven’t been that stressed (complimentary) about a Mario Kart race in a long time.

This is what a Knockout Tour race looks like before you start.
Credit: Nintendo

I also appreciate the huge number of new costume options for characters, such as Mariachi Waluigi, a version of King Boo dressed like a little fancy lad, and a Toad whose head is a cheeseburger. Importantly, Nintendo seems to have removed (or at least sidelined in the demo I played) kart customization.

You no longer pick a body, wheels, and a glider, you just pick a character and a kart, like the old days. That feature never really sat right with me in Mario Kart, which is a game that anyone should be able to pick up and play within 30 seconds. I also couldn’t tell if characters had stats in this game like they have in some previous games. At the very least, they aren’t surfaced on the selection screen.

Other odds and ends include new moves like rail grinding and wall-jumping. The former can be done at several points along any given track, while the latter didn’t show up in any of the races I did in my brief time with the game.

I appreciate any additions to the standard Mario Kart moveset nonetheless. There are also mid-race costume changes, parts where everyone will transform into a Goomba while Goombas stampede on the track for some reason, and more. Mario Kart World is a game where something nonsensical and funny happens every 5 to 10 seconds, which is what I want from it.

Donkey Kong: Bananza is doing incredible things with the concept of ‘punching’

This feels so good to do.
Credit: Nintendo

Last but certainly not least was Donkey Kong: Bananza, the incredibly titled 3D platformer starring Donkey Kong, his first starring turn in a game like this in 25 years.

Let’s get right to it: This is a game about punching stuff. There are four face buttons on a Switch controller and three of them do different kinds of punches depending on which direction you need to swing at. The other one jumps, in case you were wondering. Nearly all of the terrain in its big, vertically oriented levels is destructible, so if you see something, you can more or less just punch your way through the dirt to get to it. Donkey Kong is not interested in precise platforming. He just wants to smash everything.

My time with Bananza was pretty brief, which made the controls a little hard to get used to, though not in a way that made me worried about the game at all. There’s just a lot you can do; for instance, DK can rip up a piece of the ground below him and either throw it at enemies or ride around on it like a snowboard made of stone. He can also freely climb up vertical surfaces and roll around in a ball, which makes him a more mobile 3D platformer hero than Mario normally is.

Based on my short time with Bananza, it seems like a game with a lot of secrets to hide. The real magic here is that you can start digging through the world in a way that feels like you’re breaking the game or doing something you shouldn’t do, only to find that there was actually a secret area beneath you the whole time. Crucially, it just feels really good to punch everything in your path. I’m so glad this game is only coming out about a month after the console launches.