Given primarily to top-4 positions, it stays active for a period of time where you can spin the tail at other nearby drivers and manually time a block on incoming attacks. The only new major item the game introduces, the Tanooki Leaf, is awful. "The pack" from 3-8 get slammed with items constantly and it's difficult to keep a hold on your coins and collect the items necessary to make a run at the same time. Coins disappearing for a limited amount of time after collection like item blocks give precedence to players further ahead than the rest of the pack, ultimately making this game more forgiving for frontrunning than previous entries and conversely much harder to come back from behind. What I can't shake is the feeling that a LOT of decisions and experiments left material on the table. The differences in stats are pretty minor, but they do compound, and can make for some fun combinations. Finally, the karts are now built from randomly selected unlockable parts, earned after collecting a number of coins in your races, which gives the player way more options to fine-tune their playstyle. Stages will often have two similar paths through one area, one offering coins and one offering items, which gives players an interesting question of what they need more to maximize their odds of winning. This is my favorite new mechanic, because it allows for more decisions by the driver within a race. The new coin system encourages players to collect up to 10 coins to increase their maximum speed, with coins being lost to hazards and items throughout the race. While interesting, because of the new stage verticality allowed by these setups, its major contributions to the series are spectacle and an adventurous feeling on certain raceways, which is admirable but ultimately minor. The first and most obvious is the implementation of aerial and underwater stage sections, each controlling differently than the base driving. Let's start with the basics - MK7 does very little to shake up the core of the series, opting to make a number of smaller improvements that add up to a neat package. What we got was a mixed bag, and a bit uninspired, overall. Nintendo handed the reigns to Retro Studios, whose previous Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country Returns titles resuscitated their respective franchises, to guide the most popular racing series on earth into the next generation. Mario Kart 7 is a bit of a turning point for a series that needed a more stable identity after the immensely successful Mario Kart Wii formula fell victim to the market, as consumers slowly but surely rejecting motion controls in favor of traditional control schemes.
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