Apple / games / MARIO KART TOUR
REVIEW
Mario Kart Tour is a frozen museum of a mobile racer.
Nintendo and DeNA's pocket kart racer outgrew its gacha sins, then stopped getting new content entirely. What's left is a playable archive with thumb controls.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
For its first three years, Mario Kart Tour was the cautionary tale Nintendo’s mobile output kept getting cited for: a beloved racing series wrapped around a driver-and-kart gacha pull that asked players to spend real money on a slot machine to unlock Peach. The 2022 pivot to a direct-purchase shop fixed the worst of it. The 2023 announcement that no new content Tours would ship froze the game in place a year later.
What survives is strange and not unpleasant. The track roster is genuinely large, the city courses are unique to this version, and the touch controls work better than anything else in the genre on a phone. It is the rare live-service game that turned into a single-player relic without anyone bothering to take it offline.
The right way to play Tour in 2026 is to install it, leave the subscription alone, and treat the existing Tours as a kart-racing greatest-hits collection that happens to be free. The wrong way is to pretend it is still the same game it was at launch — for better and for worse, it isn’t.
It is the rare live-service game that turned into a single-player relic without anyone bothering to take it offline.
FEATURES
Tour is a stripped-down Mario Kart built around vertical phone play. Courses are split into short single-lap sections, races last about ninety seconds, and steering happens with a thumb drag rather than tilt by default. The roster pulls from the entire Mario Kart history — Tokyo, Paris, New York, Singapore, Berlin, the Switch tracks, the SNES ones — alongside drivers, karts, and gliders themed to each city.
The progression loop is the Tour pass and the in-game shop. Drivers, karts, and gliders are bought directly with rubies or coins rather than pulled from the gacha pipe the game launched with in 2019. Multiplayer supports 8-player real-time races over Wi-Fi or cellular, and a Gold Pass subscription tier still exists at the same monthly price it has had for years, unlocking 200cc, the Gold Gift, and extra in-game rewards.
Controller support is here for MFi and recent Xbox / DualShock pads, though the game was designed for touch and it shows in the camera and item-aim defaults.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The 2022 monetisation pivot is the part that aged best. Nintendo and DeNA pulled the slot-machine driver pull and replaced it with a shop where you see what you're buying before you spend. For a Nintendo-branded free-to-play game aimed partly at kids, that change should have happened on day one — but it did happen, and the game is meaningfully less predatory now than it was at launch.
The track design is the other thing that has held up. The city courses are the strongest argument for Tour's existence: real Mario Kart corners routed through Shibuya intersections and Parisian roundabouts, with seasonal variants you can still play through the archived Tours. None of it is on Switch, and probably never will be.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
In October 2023 Nintendo announced that the "Battle Tour" would be the final content Tour and that no new Tours would follow. Existing Tours rotate through the schedule, but nothing new ships. That is the single largest fact about this app, and the in-game UI does not really tell you. A new player downloading today walks into a game that is still collecting Gold Pass subscriptions for content that stopped expanding two and a half years ago.
The other half is that the Switch version exists. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has more tracks, full local and online multiplayer with physical controllers, and the same Nintendo polish without a free-to-play layer wrapped around it. Anyone who owns a Switch and is choosing between the two is choosing Tour because they want to play on a phone, not because Tour is better.
CONCLUSION
Mario Kart Tour is worth installing if you want a competent Mario Kart on a phone and you understand you are buying into an archive, not a live game. Skip the Gold Pass — subscribing to a frozen content library is the wrong way around. If you already own a Switch, this is the secondary experience, not the main one.