Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit Reviews

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit provides a fresh and unique gaming experience, which feels hard to come by these days. The kart is cleverly designed and well put together, responding to every precise movement. Whilst the core gameplay might get a little repetitive, the technology has a bright future, and it's guaranteed to provide fun for the whole family.

2020 has been a mostly awful year for obvious reasons, but for Mario fans it has at least in part also been a celebratory one.

Nintendo has always been at the forefront of gaming innovation and they’re back at it again by utilizing one of their most beloved franchises. Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit aims to combine the excitement of the Mario Kart franchise with the fun of racing RC cars. By utilizing augmented reality (AR), gamers will be able to race an actual Mario or Luigi RC car around a track of their own design, with the gameplay projected on the TV or Switch screen. It’s not the first time Nintendo has combined real-world toys with video games, as we’ve seen with their extensive line-up of amiibo. Will Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit drift into the hearts of Mario Kart fans or will it receive the dreaded Blue Shell of hate?

Nintendo aren’t new to combining real-world elements and toys with their games. LABO allowed gamers to piece together cardboard creations to pair with the Switch, for example, but the one thing LABO possibly lacked was its direct connection to nostalgia and simplicity. Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is the next Nintendo experiment, combining a real-world racing kart that can be controlled via your Switch, as you race around your house using augmented reality elements that, at times, feels pr...

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a gleefully successful experiment for Nintendo and Velan Studios...though some minor elements hold it back from exceeding expectations.

As both a game and a toy, Mario Kart Live delivers on most of its promise, save for a few annoyances and a high barrier of entry for multiplayer

A wonderfully inventive attempt to bring Mario Kart into the real world, whose mere premise is enough to amuse and delight, despite some unavoidable practical limitations.

Mario Kart has been in the virtual realm for a very long time and it's about to enter your living room via a new augmented reality game.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is an entertaining take on the classic franchise. The mixed reality format allows player creativity to shine, as the ceiling for possibility is practically infinite. Nintendo is able to expertly weave staple Mario Kart features and characteristics into an augmented reality setting, making the game stand out from other RC racers. Players may be limited by their own home environment, or the rather short connectivity range of the kart itself. Despite a handful of technical road bumps, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is an exciting and inventive way to play the beloved racer.

I suspect many 10-year-olds will have Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit on their wishlists this holiday season. The game itself is a brilliant idea: you use your Nintendo Switch to control a toy kart around a real-life course you set up in your house. It seems like the start of something great, but unfortunately, it doesn't reach its fullest potential.

I enjoyed Mario Kart Tour more than this. That's a pretty brutal way to start off a review considering the reception Mario Kart Tour received from a majority of the gaming community, but it's also genuinely how I feel. As a game, purely as a video game, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is the least fun I've had playing a Mario Kart game. But to judge this by the software alone is doing the product, and you readers, a grave disservice. This isn't just a traditional Mario Kart game, this is a fascinating and complex remote-controlled car for kids, and this Christmas, this is definitely going to put smiles on faces.

One thing that physical space does offer is a malleability of the track that doesn't exist in pre-programmed Mario Kart race settings. Using cardboard boxes or other small environmental obstacles that can be interacted with changes the way races go on a lap-by-lap basis. Accidentally bumping into a few plastic cups, for instance, knocks them over and then creates a much more hazardous obstacle on the second lap, as much of the track is now blocked by the same cups that were stacked prior. It's simple, but effective, and creates the kind of variance in racing that feels more player-controlled than those instances where someone gets annihilated by a blue shell - though that still happens too, and the RC car amusingly just stops movement as if the racer is aghast that such a thing happened to them.

“A full grid of annoyances force Home Circuit from a sweet drift into a disappointing spin.”

Since its debut on the SNES, the Mario Kart series has been one of Nintendo’s most consistently fun franchises. Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit invites you to bring the action into the real world, using your Switch and a physical remote-controlled car with a camera to bridge the gap between reality and your screen. The concept of configuring your room as a racetrack and speeding through it as Mario is an exciting prospect, and while it’s often novel and enjoyable, a few noteworthy speedbumps prevent it from taking home the gold trophy.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is Nintendo at its toyetic peak, with a magical AR effect that nonetheless requires some elbow grease to find the fun.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit’s mixed reality novelty excels when you have the space and motivation to make your courses flourish, but occasional tech hiccups and clogged wheels are hazards just as dangerous as any Blue Shell. That said, when I took the time to really lean into the creative challenge building a track presented me with, I was often rewarded by having a blast racing on it. Some familiar mechanics get lost in the translation to AR, but this is still an enjoyable Mario Kart game no matter what roadway I made.