Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - Booster Course Pack Wave 1 Review

The series' longest-running game keeps going - but should you put your pedal to the metal here, or have they run out of gas?

Eight years ago this month, Mario Kart 8 was released for the Wii U. Four years ago, the game came out for the Nintendo Switch, released as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, packing the downloadable content packs that were originally add-ons for the Wii U version into the base game for the Switch release to add a little oomph to what was otherwise a pretty substandard offering.

It’s not that Mario Kart 8 is bad – quite the contrary – but the expectation at this point is that with a new system comes a new game in the Mario Kart franchise, and the Switch is, in many senses, the first console to have bucked that trend. Given the relative unpopularity of the Wii U and the overwhelming success of the Switch, it’s unsurprising that they attempted to re-release an excellent game hampered by the console it was on, but fans who had both systems found themselves let down by a lack of new content.

That is, until a few months ago, when Nintendo announced the Course Booster pack, a series of six waves of eight tracks apiece to be dispersed over the next two years. In adding 48 retro tracks, it doubles the number of tracks available in the game – and as such, you’d think it’s a boon, considering the price is just 24.99 USD (or, if you get some sort of Nintendo Switch Online expansion pass, it’s a bundle deal) – but we’re here to give to an honest review of what the 1st wave of DLC tracks is like, what we might be able to expect from the rest of the pack looking forward, and whether you’ll be getting your money’s worth with these new courses.

So, let’s get straight into it.

The first wave of the Course Pack included two cups – the Golden Dash Cup and the Lucky Cat Cup. We’ll look at each cup individually, breaking things down by track before bringing it all together to talk about the wave’s overarching impact.

First, the Golden Dash Cup, containing four courses: [Tour] Paris Promenade, [3DS] Toad Circuit, [N64] Choco Mountain, and [Wii] Coconut Mall.¹ It’s an excellent variety in source material, with good enough variance between the style of driving and the type of track among the four to keep things intriguing. It’s not picture-perfect, though.

Paris Promenade is the first DLC course and the first course in any console game to come from the gacha simulator Mario Kart Tour, available on mobile devices the world over. It’s a major point of contention within the franchise and its fandom, as many fans – myself included – feel as though development on Mario Kart 9 and subsequent offerings in the franchise have been staved off by the development and prioritization of the mobile game, oft because of its pay-to-win system that emphasizes “spins” and chance rollings.

That’s not the point, though, and I won’t yell at you all about that right now. I’ll do that later.

The Promenade does well visually; it’s a really pleasing experience, way better than I was frankly expecting. It’s fun to drive, though I think the best part of the track for me is the third lap reverse, in which you essentially get to take the same track you did on the first two laps, but in reverse. It’s a fun twist implemented in a couple of the Tour offerings, and I wouldn’t be mad if that became a mainstay for those courses specifically.

That’s unfortunately because outside of that reverse, I find the track pretty boring. Not every course is going to be a barnstormer, but there’s such little standing excitement when it comes to the Promenade; it feels as though you’re just strolling along. There’s a distinct lack of action points, with a lot of sweeping turns that lead into tight angles that may prove tough to navigate at 200cc, but don’t prove particularly conducive to tight battles. I found myself frontrunning this course on all five levels of gameplay, and it was the only course where I managed to lap people on multiple difficulties.

Toad Circuit is the other course where I managed to lap someone, but that’s mostly just because in my copy of the game Lakitu really should have just stuck to fetching the poor souls who fall off the course. Dude sucks.

Toad’s basically just ripped off Luigi Circuit from the Wii version here, and thoroughly so, with the stylistic choices nearly in parallel the whole way through. I will say, there’s a bit more excitement than in Luigi Circuit, and yet I find myself preferring Luigi’s take. Toad’s version misses twice, in that it isn’t exciting enough to feel Mario Kart, nor does it resemble a standard track enough to just have that drag race sort of sense to it that works well in other similar cases.

Not having this one as an opener was a miss, too. I understand that they likely wanted to open with a Tour track to say “hey look see this isn’t just a direct mobile port,” but I fear that in doing so you create this valley by inserting this track second.

Choco Mountain comes third: a rehash of the N64 track, but not nearly as sweet as its previous iterations. This track additionally featured as a retro course in the Nintendo DS release, as well as in the Mario Kart Tour game (as is the case with most every retro track here).

Unfortunately, in order to make these courses Tour-worthy, oftentimes pieces were removed or reworked, and slight changes to the course made to accommodate these alterations almost unilaterally – in my opinion – strike to the negative.

Where I find myself most disappointed with this one is that it just isn’t all that fun to play – the turns alternate between far too sweeping and extremely tight, regardless of the speed and difficulty with which you’re playing the game. The long water section loses all of the appeal of slamming someone off the edge into last place, instead replacing it with turns that are just… unexciting. There’s very little to the course that draws me back to it, though I must give credit in that it is beautifully designed.

Coconut Mall is our closer here, and I’m still formulating how I feel about this one, to be honest. On one hand, it’s a neat recreation, and one of my favorite tracks from Wii finally making a reappearance is super welcome. But on the other hand, a lot of the tiny details that made the track so enjoyable in the first place have been cut out, replaced by less enjoyable substitutes or just removed entirely. It’s the issue that I fear is going to be replicated throughout the DLC phase, as tracks ported through from Tour tend to be a little lacking as previously mentioned.

The good: it’s still fun as hell to play. Racing through a mall is a dream scenario, and they’ve done brilliantly to echo that same feeling of fun. The bright colors return, so it’s still got that pop that draws you in.

The bad: the cars don’t move anymore. There’s also a little less of a “mall” feeling, with textured walls and actual escalators replaced by flat monotone surfaces and ramps with color-coded arrows. It’s a little less “oh hey I’m at my local mall” and a bit more “you’re in a dream and you didn’t render this wall”. 

Honestly, though – that’s really it as far as my complaints for this track. I think it was better suited to Wii’s driving style, but that’s a feeling I have about quite a few tracks, so it wouldn’t be fair to single this one out as an example of it not really working with 8’s mechanics.

All in all? It’s a fun cup. Coconut Mall is the definite highlight, while Toad’s Circuit is the lowlight. My biggest concern is that there isn’t a huge amount of replayability to me, and I don’t want that to become thematic throughout this DLC.

We still have one more cup, though, the Lucky Cat Cup, containing [Tour] Tokyo Blur, [DS] Shroom Ridge, [GBA] Sky Garden, and [Tour] Ninja Hideaway. Another solid set, with good variety between the games they’re pulling from. We get a double-dose of Tour in this pack.

Tokyo Blur comes first and honestly comes best, I think. It’s, like Paris, an innovative track, using that same design choice that gives you an inverted last lap on Paris to give you a unique drive each lap on this track. That variety is best implemented here, and the track is paced well enough that some of the more boring stretches don’t ever last too long.

Driving on the highways of Mario-verse Tokyo is surprisingly fun, even though the tracks are wide enough for it to never really be much a matter of tight corners and well-executed drifts. It’s still enjoyable to drive, and I’m pretty comfortable calling it my favorite track in this cup and second in the pack.

Shroom Ridge wasn’t much fun in the DS version, but I had a better time in this edition with it. I will say, though, it’s completely unsuited for 200cc. You can hammer that brake as much as you want, honey, you’re not making any of those corners. It’s actually pretty fun outside of that, but given that 200 is my favorite gamemode, it’s a bit of a shame that the track is near-undriveable. 

Sky Garden had the potential to be so great – I loved this track in the DS version of the game, where it was featured as a retro course – and to see it bastardized as it has been is really a shame. I’d expected a lot more when I originally saw that it was on the list, and while it’s a step up from the proto-gameplay footage that we saw some time ago pre-release, I’m rather disappointed on the whole.

Adding changes in elevation is really neat and adds (literal) depth to a track that could definitely use it, but with that comes changes that took away so much of the personality of the course that, to me, they’re almost distinct entities in my head. I think that, had they branded this as a new course entirely, I’d’ve enjoyed it more and regarded it a little more highly, but taking the name of a course I loved and bringing out a decidedly inferior product (see: Wario’s Gold Mine) is never going to end super well.

Ninja Hideaway is last and… least. It’s not ideal, but this track just doesn’t do it for me at all. It oscillates wildly between “there is nothing happening” and “holy overstimulation”, oftentimes settling well in the camp of the latter, much to my chagrin.

The dual-tiered structure of the course is extremely cool, and the amount of pathing options available to you are varied enough that a math class could have a field day with permutations to it. But at the same time, it all just feels a little inaccessible? Not often literally, as it’s quite easy to move to just about any spot on the course if you really want to get to it, but in the sense that none of the paths seem to lend any sort of advantage, nor is there really any impetus to deviate from the norm.

You take your chosen path, you finish okay. You switch it up, you finish okay. There’s no real madness to it – and granted, I don’t think that making one path clearly better is necessarily the move here, but when you’re offered such a choice, I think it’s really important to incentivize that choice. Whether through offering speed versus items or some other dichotomy, there are ways – and Nintendo has done this IN THIS GAME with Bone Dry Dunes among other courses – to give your choices meaning. It’s disappointing that they chose not to here.

All in all? It’s the weaker of the two for me, personally. Tokyo Blur is my unexpected highlight, but the rest of the cup was lowlights, and Ninja Hideaway is regretfully probably my biggest disappointment. It’s not my least favorite track in the set, mind you, but I wanted so much more from it and, based on the visuals, was hoping that it’d be a significantly cooler experience than what I was treated to.

So.

On the whole, what’s the takeaway?

The Booster Course Pack is really fun. It’s Mario Kart: it’s going to be phenomenal no matter how you spin it. That said, the influence of Tour is undeniable, and not in a wholly good way. Corners seem to have been cut, and there’s a certain rushed feeling to this DLC that reeks of “we’re only making money on this once, so it doesn’t matter as much” that I didn’t feel when I bought this game in 2014 for my Wii U or in 2017 for my Switch.

Where the courses stand out is the innovation in routing. Adding real-world environments and making them beautiful is pretty awesome but, on the flipside, the tracks are a little unpolished. Sections of them aren’t that fun to drive, a feeling I’m not accustomed to in Mario Kart games at all. Pretty colors can’t paint over gaping holes, and that’s a bit of the feeling that I get sometimes when I try to play these tracks.

Too often, I found myself just sort of tapping my foot during a race hoping to get through this one so I could get to the next track or next cup or whatever else came after – and that’s not a great feeling to have after three or four playthroughs. The variety you can derive from character/vehicle/tire/glider choice will add some longevity to the lifespan of this cycle, but it’s telling that I’m kind of geared towards Wave 2 already.

Is it worth the money?

My vote is undeniably yes. Mario Kart is Mario Kart. You know what you’re going to get, and even if these courses aren’t quite to par with the other 48 in the game, you’re paying half that price for what I would still consider well over value; at $25, this is well worth any price to be paid. Remember, it’s five more sets of eight after this one. We’re far from done.

What’s your track ranking?

Coconut Mall is the clear standout, with Tokyo Blur probably second. After that, it’s a bit desolate: I think Sky Garden limps home to third, with Paris Promenade, Shroom Ridge, and Choco Mountain coming in fourth through sixth. Ninja Hideaway slinks in seventh, and Toad’s Circuit is bottom dog in this first wave.

Mario Kart Tour Is Bad

I am writing this article Soon™, I promise.

It’s unfortunate. Maybe I’m just salty that we still haven’t gotten a Mario Kart game solely for the Switch, maybe I’m guilty of hyping up these tracks to be more than what they were ever meant to be, but I expected better from Nintendo, frankly. Too often, these tracks feel like they were ripped straight off of my phone, and that Tour game is not nearly good enough for that to be happening. They did what they could to patch the gaps, but it’s like I mentioned: no amount of flashy pastel is going to cover the fact that there are massive drops in quality between the original 48 and what’s in this next set.

Final Thoughts

Mario Kart is the game of generations of people. It brings families, friends, lovers, and loved ones together for an equally delightful and infuriating time, designed to both forge and break friendships with equal tenacity. I have made lifelong friends in the trenches of Battle Mode, and then lost them because WHAT THE FUCK MAN THAT BLUE SHELL WAS COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY – but I digress.

The Booster Course Pack isn’t quite as good as the base Mario Kart 8 game is. That is undeniable. If you can look past that, it’s more fun to be had with the people you care about – and with how things have been the past few years, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with encouraging a bit more of that.

1. Brackets reference the game where the course was first featured.