At 50cc I haven’t run into much trouble. It’s possible that on harder courses I’ll feel more compelled to collect a driver with bonuses for it, but for now grinding to unlock new characters optional. At the same time, it’s easy to see how I might want to buy some extra gems if I’m struggling on later courses against other players with rarer drivers and better cars. It’s hard to know how it will all shake out this early on, but Mario Kart Tour certainly has the ingredients for a potentially grueling gacha-style grind.

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More alarming is a stamina bar consisting of hearts. Every heart seems to last for about 15 minutes or so. If you run out you can’t play until you wait a bit or purchase more hearts with gems. I haven’t run into this problem yet, so I don’t have a good handle on how much it limits you, but it’s still a weird thing to see in a Mario Kart game.

Finally there are gold coins, which you can collect during races and also earn based on your performance. They’re used to buy stuff from a store whose stock seems like it will rotate every so often. While you can’t buy gold coins outright, you can buy gems, which can be spent to enter a coin rush mode where you drive around a track solo collecting as many coins as you can. For five gems every coin is worth double. For 25 gems every coin is worth 10.

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Since this is just the game’s beta, all of these mechanics are subject to change or drastic overhauled. As it stands Mario Kart Tour is fun to play in the moment but feels more about collecting and unlocking things than actual racing. I’ve only come in second once so far, and even then the game wouldn’t tell me by how much, even though I’m sure it was fractions of a second behind my opponent. It mostly feels like you’re racing yourself, just with other people around, trying to get more stars, coins, and gems to unlock additional circuits. None of that is bad on its own, but in the beta the game doesn’t have a mode where you can just race with other people on an even playing field for the fun of it.