I found this trend of cutting content lame. No battle mode just like in Smash no traditional modes.
Anyway, good read. I found the tracks to be uninspired and bland.

Even though 8.5 is a good score you better get your flame shield up lol.

Yep, the score is high.

Just a recommendation, this is your review. It is supposed to reflect your opinions. Screw everyone else (I'm serious)

overall, nice review

I agree, for me Mario Kart 8 is (no pun intended), a high 8.
If It had specially made tracks for battle mode it would have been the game of the year. A high 9.

What left me most disappointed about this game is something not mentioned much; the character animations. They're not bad but still choppy, and I think we'd expect something a little better than that for next-gen Mario Kart. Still my GoTY nonetheless.

Nice review. About an 8 is deserved IMO. I like some of the new tracks but the plethora of reused tracks was disappointing and why they took out a traditional battle mode confuses me. Overall pretty good.

You guys should know every Mario Kart sans the original has 16 new tracks, with an additional 16 remade tracks starting from the DS version, so I'm not really sure why you'd expect it to be different here, and if you want more tracks there's DLC.

"The wide arrange of course and plenty of karts, characters, and items to pick from make this game hard not to put down."

I will keep this in mind next time I feel the urge to recommend this title to someone.



On a more serious note, I strongly disagree with the balancing part. If you play Mario Circuit on Time Trails and hit all possible Piranha Plants and drive off-course once per lap, you will find that the heavy vehicles still win despite their acceleration disadvantage. Having a high top speed is by far the most important part when picking a character/kart combination, and is the reason why you rarely see smaller characters perform well online.

Nevertheless, my score would still be higher than yours since I don't agree with your views on the retro tracks, don't care about battle mode and since Waluigi is high tier due to the "balancing".

Most of the remakes are barely recognizable to their original counterparts, and regardless it seems silly that you'd like it better to just have 16 all new tracks rather than that plus 16 retro ones, but eh to each their own!