The beta for Mario Kart Tour officially kicked off today, and while Nintendo hasn't revealed much about the upcoming mobile game, those who got into the beta are sharing details about it.
The game starts out like previous entries in the Mario Kart series, letting you select a player, kart, and glider and then racing on tracks from previous games in the Mario Kart series. When you're racing, you can pick up item boxes that include items like banana peels, shells, and stars.
One big difference with Mario Kart Tour are the controls, because you're playing on a touchscreen instead of a console with a controller. As Kotaku notes, you steer by dragging your finger to the left and right of your character, and the farther you move your finger in one direction, the harder you'll turn. You can also drift by making a late, aggressive turn, and like in other Mario Kart games, drifting for a few seconds will give you a boost.
And then there are the microtransactions. You collect Grand Stars by completing races and challenges, and these stars can be used to unlock more circuits and gifts. These gifts can contain green gems, which are the game's premium currency but are not currently available for purchase in the beta. Paying five gems will let you "pull" a green pipe to get a new driver, kart, or glider. Each of those three has different bonuses depending on the stage they're on, like getting three item slots instead of one on a particular level, meaning some characters and karts are better choices on certain levels than others.
There's also a stamina bar that's made up of hearts, each of which lasts around 15 minutes. If your stamina bar runs out, you can't play until you wait a bit or buy more hearts with gems.
The game also has gold coins that you collect during races and earn based on your performance. You can use these coins to buy items from a store. You can also use gems to enter a coin rush mode that lets you drive a track by yourself and collect coins.
The Mario Kart Tour beta — which is now closed — will run through June 4th. Nintendo has said that the game's full launch is this summer, and so it's possible that some tweaks could be made between now and the public release.
The fact that this is a Mario Kart game that's coming to smartphones is sure to earn it a lot of interest when it does launch on Android and iOS. The microtransactions could be a bit of a turn-off for some folks, especially the fact that you have to buy hearts with green gems to keep playing for an extended period of time, but we'll have to wait for the official launch to see exactly how long these hearts last and how often you need to wait before playing again if you don't buy them.
Based on what we've seen of it so far, what do you think of Mario Kart Tour?
