Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

Genre: Kart Racer / Hardware

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Mario Kart Live is a package that combines the usual Kart Racing-style gameplay that Mario Kart pretty much invented with an actual physical remote controlled car, pairing the two using augmented reality via a camera in the RC car itself. This game was released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, and players can get a Mario RC car or a Luigi RC car, with players needing to get both if they want to play in two-player mode. Each of these packages retails at $100, so this is definitely a more expensive way to play Mario Kart, even if it’s understandable due to the game actually coming with its own hardware.

Before even thinking about getting this game, know that it comes with a laundry list of limitations. Firstly, any limitations that apply to a typical RC car apply here – you want to be wary of thick carpets, and especially wary if you have a lot of loose hair or an otherwise unclean floor. In addition, you’ll need a fairly open area for your kart to drive around in, and this area will have to be close to your Nintendo Switch – playing the game in docked mode may prove to be a challenge for this reason alone. The area must be relatively flat (sorry, crazy ramps may mess with the game’s AR features). Nintendo also recommends that you not use the cart outdoors, though I can imagine some will inevitably find a driveway or garage to be an ideal place for this game.

I have a fairly large room in my house that I was able to use for this game. It has a hard concrete floor as well as a setup I use for my Nintendo Switch in docked mode when playing with company, so I thought this would be ideal. However, even with these extraordinary conditions, I still found myself running into problems. My room is about 30’ long, but the game started having difficulty detecting the RC car at around 20’-25’ away from the Nintendo Switch. This meant that the signal was cutting in and out repeatedly. It was still technically responsive, but the message was clear – the game was not meant to function at this distance from the Nintendo Switch.

However, even at closer distances, there were still times when the game’s connection became a bit choppy, and the in-game objects and characters didn’t quite match up with the movement over the real ground in real-time. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a joy to see these artificial objects and characters interacting with the real world at all, but the technology here just isn’t perfect, and those imperfections reared their heads quite often.

Another issue here is that these AR elements are projected over the real camera images, which at times obscures real-life obstructions that players need to watch for. I found myself repeatedly running into my furniture because the game made it hard to see where that furniture was, or showed me the course’s path running through a real-life obstruction instead of reading that obstruction as, well, an obstruction.

I start with all of these warnings because I feel like if you’re going to invest in the high cost of this game, you need to know these limitations upfront. Now on to the good stuff.

I’ll start by saying that the fact that this game even exists is just really, really neat. The moment I started driving my little RC car and saw my in-game Mario looking up at the world from my floor, even looking at my feet from Mario’s perspective, there’s a unique kind of joy there that’s unlike any other. In fact, if players want to, there’s no reason they can’t just play the “game” this way, treating it as an RC car with a built-in camera that they can follow around with their Nintendo Switch. And you know, that in itself would be perfectly fine.

However, this is a spin-off of a racing game franchise, and it does include some pretty clever tools to create your own custom race tracks. Players wanting to race must start by putting down four included cardboard gates as well as optional additional signage. These gates act as checkpoints for Mario to drive through in sequential order, and can be placed wherever you like. Then players “create” the course by moving the car to a point just before the first gate and driving a path through each of the gates in order. This path can cross over itself in a figure 8, it can have crazy turns or loops or whatever, as long as you can get through all the gates and back to the start point.

After doing so, the game remembers this path and when players select a “course” to play, it applies that course’s theme to the path like a skin. However, there’s a bit more to it than that. Different courses have different obstacles in them, and the way these are implemented in-game are quite clever. Some courses have wind that actually pushes your RC car around (making it veer in one direction). Some have enemies that will briefly stop your RC car. Some courses obscure your vision with different lighting or fog effects. While the themes of these courses are conveyed partly through what amounts to a glorified “instagram filter”, there’s also AR changes made to each of the gates, that transform into thematically-fitting versions of those gates, as well as theme-fitting enemies, obstacles, and power-ups that litter the track you create.

And of course, on top of this, you have enemies and items. Players will face off against the Koopa Kids in each race (the lack of variety in enemies is a bit disappointing), and players and enemies alike will get items from item boxes to use on one another, with all of these coming from prior Mario games, though not all of them work quite the same. The Bullet Bill, for example, makes you faster and impervious to in-game obstacles, but it doesn’t automatically move you around like the version of the power-up in other Mario Kart games. Likewise, the lightning bolt briefly stops everyone, but doesn’t shrink you.

One of the things that I found a bit disappointing here is that the hit detection for enemies in-game is spotty at best, as the game tries to figure out just where the heck those enemies are in the real world. There were times I would use an item on an enemy right ahead of me and it would pass right through them. Heck, often my own kart would pass right through them. To some extent, I suppose this is just an inevitable limit of the technology, but that doesn’t make it less disappointing when it happens.

At the very least I can say that when the game works well, it is a joy – the incorporation of Mario Kart’s excellent cartoony 3D visuals and real-life camera images looks absolutely fantastic (when it works), and bumping into real-world things even has Mario react in-game to the jarring collision. The game also makes use of great tunes from throughout the Mario Kart series that really sell the feeling that this is indeed a Mario Kart game. And while it is a bit annoying to have to move around the gates if you want to change the course layout from one race to the next (which you don’t have to), the way each of the “skins” affects the gameplay makes up for this somewhat.

Is Mario Kart Live a gimmick? Yes, absolutely. Does it have some serious flaws that make it at times frustrating, tedious, or disappointing? Yes, absolutely. But it’s still a truly unique and wonderful experience like nothing else on the market. If you don’t mind the $100-$200 expense, have a decent space to make the game work, aren’t opposed to the sort of setup and teardown that the game requires to play, and aren’t demanding perfection in your AR experience, Mario Kart Live offers a unique and wonderful experience that’s well worth having… but the fact that I have to list all of those caveats does mean that this isn’t a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to everyone.

tl;dr – Mario Kart Live takes Nintendo’s classic Kart Racer series into the world of AR games with an actual physical RC car that interacts with the game on Nintendo Switch using a camera. It’s a wonderful and unique experience, but one that comes with a lot of requirements, has a fair number of flaws, and has a pretty high expense. If you don’t mind these issues, this is something truly unlike anything else out there, and it is definitely fun, but be warned that this fun does come with a hefty number of issues too.

Grade: B-

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