More than a year and a half after it was first announced, Mario Kart Tour has finally gotten a release date.
Mario Kart Tour will launch on September 25. Nintendo confirmed the news today, and the game is now available for "pre-order" on both the App Store and the Play Store.
Like Nintendo's other mobile games, Mario Kart Tour is free to start. The game has you racing around classic Mario Kart courses and on levels inspired by real-world cities. You can use items just like in traditional Mario Kart games, but rather than using a controller, you can steer and drift in Mario Kart Tour using one finger.
The game also has you collecting Grand Stars by racing to unlock more drivers, karts, and gliders. During the beta that ran a few months ago, we also saw that the game had a premium currency of green gems that you could use to unlock more karts, drivers, and gliders. And then there's stamina, which the beta showed was made up of hearts that each lasted around 15 minutes. When your stamina ran out, you could wait to play again or buy more hearts with gems.
One other thing to note is that Mario Kart Tour does require a persistent connection to the internet.
Mario Kart is a beloved gaming series, and so it'll surely attract a lot of interest from iPhone and Android users when it launches in one month. The question is, will those players stick with the game after downloading it and playing a race or two. The game looks nice in the screens that we've seen so far, but we'll have to wait until next month to see how controls and what the microtransactions are like now that the game is complete.
Are you going to try Mario Kart Tour?