That’s the case for most games, and it’s always been true of Mario Kart. It’s not a surprise that Home Circuit is best experienced with other people. They’ve actually spent far more time seeking than racing so far. My kids, aged five and seven, turned this into a game of hide-and-seek, using the karts’ built-in cameras to spot each other hiding around the house. While racing is obviously the main point of playing Mario Kart, Home Circuit also has a free-roam mode where you can just drive around the house. Having another person playing also helps bring out the toy-like nature of the karts. (It also makes a great spectator experience, as those not playing can watch the tiny cars zipping around and help repair the track mid-race.) Throw together two remote-controlled cars in a pile of plastic and cardboard, and that’s amplified even more I can only imagine how wild things get with three or four karts. Mario Kart has always been a game about mayhem. Pylons were everywhere, the gates kept getting pushed around, and it wasn’t long before our cats got confused and started running through the course. My family built an expansive race track using small, colorful pylons to mark the edge of the road, carefully placing everything just so. In my experience, this mostly turned into a huge mess. You can bang into each other and push your friends into IRL obstacles. Even when you bang into them, there’s not much of an impact you can’t go around knocking computer-controlled characters off the track.īut that changes when there’s another real kart in the race. While your kart has to deal with both real and virtual obstacles - you can bang into a coffee table and be hit by a red shell, sometimes simultaneously - your competitors don’t have the same challenge. One of the stranger things about playing Home Circuit solo is the lack of physicality. Photo: Nintendo Read next: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit review The game then augments this by adding virtual power-ups, obstacles, and visual effects to turn your living room into something out of the Mushroom Kingdom. You create a course by setting up four cardboard gates around your house, which form the outline of your track.
Home Circuit multiplayer works the same as the base game. That said, if you can gather up all the necessary hardware, it’s a much better experience with friends. There’s no form of split-screen play or any other kind of more approachable multiplayer solution. Each player requires not only a physical kart, which cost $99.99 each, but also their own Switch to control it. The game - which has players controlling RC karts with their Switch, while driving through a real-life obstacle course - is expensive to play with friends. It’s not something you can enjoy out of the box. In my review of Home Circuit, my biggest issue was how inaccessible multiplayer can be. Here, the chaos is more physical - and it can be a lot of fun if you don’t mind the mess. And I don’t mean the typical chaos associated with Mario Kart, like frustratingly timed blue shells or the nightmare of speeding through Rainbow Road.
In order to enjoy playing Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit with friends, you need to embrace chaos.