If you’re like me, you might have booted up Mario Kart World and immediately started spamming Charge Jumps as soon as you learned how to do them. After all, they seem like a Drift that lets you keep moving straight, and Drifts are awesome! Charge Jumps generate Mini-Turbos just like drifting does too, and Mario Kart World features more wide straight paths than any game in the series has had before. You can even start charging another Charge Jump the second you land! This has to be a new speed-generating technique, right?
Unfortunately, it appears the opposite is true: Charge Jumps actually slow you down.
Day-one Kart fans began to notice that Charge Jumps might actually come with a speed loss shortly after release. These findings were then confirmed via a YouTube video by Karting All Day titled “What’s the FASTEST way to go STRAIGHT in Mario Kart World?” Among the experiments shown in the video, a racer using Charge Jumps is shown going face to face against an identical racer who is simply accelerating forward without pressing any other buttons. The Charge Jump player definitively loses.
The Charge Jump slows you down, no matter which character or vehicle you use
The video by Karting All Day is probably enough evidence to show that you shouldn’t spam Charge Jumps in Mario Kart World, but just to be extra sure, I repeated the video’s experiments myself. I switched my test subjects to two Baby Marios using the Cute Scoot just to see if a low Top Speed and high Acceleration build would meaningfully change the results.
[Narrator’s voice]: it didn’t.
The Charge-Jump-spamming-Baby-Mario would always lose ground as soon as he initiated a Charge Jump, and the Mini-Turbo afterward just couldn’t make up the difference. The results were the same on water, though it did seem the two racers wound up closer together than they did during the land test.
Frankly, even if there is a kart and driver combination that can get a slight speed boost from Charge Jumps under the right circumstances, I still wouldn’t recommend it. You’d be much better off looking for jumps to do tricks off of and grabbing item boxes than compromising your mobility for a virtually insignificant (at best) speed boost. Maybe a speedrunner will find a use for this tech on long straightaways, but for now, it’s not worth spamming.
So, what’s the Charge Jump even good for then?
Despite everything said above, Charge Jumps are still useful! Just generating one spark while initiating a Charge Jump will give you enough air to latch onto grind rails (which the game officially calls “Rail Rides”), which can increase your speed under the right circumstances. Even if a Rail Ride isn’t a speed boost, you still might prefer pulling one off to break away from a congested crowd of racers throwing an utter mess of items at each other.
Charge Jumps can also be used to initiate Wall Rides, which are similarly situational speed boosts. Even if you aren’t an expert player looking to shave seconds off your World Record times, you do need to Wall Ride to get several Question Block Panels in Free Roam mode. So one way or another, you want to get used to pulling this trick off.
Grinds and Wall Rides take a lot of practice and planning to be genuinely helpful during races, but they can lead to some of the coolest tricks the Mario Kart series has ever seen if you do them right. So long story short, even if you shouldn’t use Charge Jumps everywhere you go, you should absolutely experiment with them to see what shortcuts they might lead to. You might find routes that completely change the way you see certain tracks.
Mario Kart World is available now on Switch 2.