“Free Roam” mode is Mario Kart World’s killer app

When Ars tried out Mario Kart World at April’s Switch 2 premiere hands-on event, the short demos focused on more-or-less standard races in the game’s Grand Prix and Knockout modes. So when Nintendo invited us back for more time previewing the near-final version of the game before the Switch 2’s release, we decided to focus most of our time on the game’s mysterious (and previously teased) “Free Roam” mode.

We’re glad we did, because the mode feels like the hidden gem of Mario Kart World and maybe of the Switch 2 launch as a whole. Combining elements of games like Diddy Kong Racing, Forza Horizon, and even the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, Free Roam provides a unique mixture of racing challenges, exploration, and collectibles that should keep new Switch 2 owners busy for a while.

Switch hunt

Surprisingly, Free Roam mode isn’t listed as one of the main options when you launch a new game of Mario Kart World. Instead, a tiny note in the corner of the screen tells you to hit the plus button to get dropped into a completely untimed and free-wheeling version of the vast Mario Kart World map.

Exploring in Free Roam mode provides the best sense of scale for the game’s massive, multi-ecosystem island in a way individual races just can’t. Sure, other race modes sometimes let you travel between the individual race courses along pre-set paths from one finish line to another starting line. But Free Roam mode lets you fully explore the vast spaces between those paths, encouraging you to go off-roading in the mountains, valleys, rivers, oceans, volcanoes, snowdrifts, and landmarks that dot the countryside.

Your main explicit goal when exploring all this varied expanse is to look for large, blue P-Switches, each of which activates a short, timed challenge mission in the immediate vicinity. In many cases, simply reaching the P-Switch is half the challenge, requiring some inventive wall-riding or item use to get to a particularly out-of-the-way corner of the map.

The 15 P-Switch missions I was able to uncover during my preview hours with the Free Roam mode showed a fair deal of variety, too. While many missions involved simply collecting a series of nearby blue coins, for instance, no two of those missions played out all that similarly. One might involve dodging rampaging T-rexes chomping at your kart, while others might ask you to grind on the rails of a suspension bridge or hop through the desert sands amid sunken ruins.

Some of the missions I encountered were relaxing sojourns, like one that asked me to “seek peace by climbing the falls” before sending me skimming along the surface of the water alongside gently leaping cheep cheeps. Others were punishing obstacle courses, like one that asked me to race backward through the winding Donkey Kong Spaceport course—except, littered with additional debris and under a strict time limit.

There were missions that felt like a rally racing mini-game, asking me to navigate between timer-extending rings dotting barren desert ruins. There were others that took the form of an “endurance race,” where I had to dodge through a crowd of traffic to make it to each checkpoint gate before time ran out. I even stumbled on one mission that felt a bit like a 3D platform game, requiring precision jumps between bouncy clouds to make it to the goal (being able to rewind time after falling off the clouds made me feel like I was in an early 2000s Prince of Persia game).

Most of these challenges won’t be especially taxing for anyone with sufficient racing experience. Even so, the sheer variety of different tasks—and the ways those tasks are presented in different parts of the game’s massive map—should keep the P-Switch hunt from feeling dull or rote.