Nintendo is back with another wave of eight courses for the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass, bringing us to the halfway point of its overall road map. Now we're up to a total of 24 new tracks over six unique cups, but so far, the output has been a bit mixed: we’ve had some bonafide classics like Coconut Mall and Mushroom Gorge, but also some absolute stinkers like New York Minute and Tokyo Blur. So how does the latest wave compare? Well thankfully, there’s a lot here to like and fewer bad eggs in the mix, making this comfortably the strongest batch of new courses yet.
Starting off with Rock Cup, we’ve got London Loop, Boo Lake, Alpine Pass, and Maple Treeway. Things get off to a bit of a rough start, as London Loop is easily the weakest track of the whole bunch; this might come as little surprise given that it’s based on Mario Kart Tour and lacks the verticality and creativity seen in other games, but there’s no doubting that London Loop is an exceptionally dull start to Rock Cup. Conversely, the latter three courses are all remarkably fun in their own way, from Boo Lake’s deceptive simplicity to Maple Treeway’s meandering track and stomping Wigglers. It’s great fun and incredibly nostalgic if you’ve played the original games on which the tracks come from.
Moving onto the Moon Cup, this one introduces Berlin Byways, Peach Gardens, Merry Mountain, and Rainbow Road. Every course here is a certified banger, with Berlin Byways proving to be a significant improvement over London Loop with a lot more variety and some lovely views. Merry Mountain, also from Tour, is an absolute delight, and it serves as a perfect treat for anyone looking to get into the Christmas spirit. It arguably boasts the strongest sense of verticality of the whole roster and looks absolutely gorgeous to boot.
Many were citing Maple Treeway as the potential star of Wave 3 ahead of its release, but honestly, the 3DS version of Rainbow Road is undoubtedly the best track on offer. Combining a wonderful layout with absolutely exquisite visuals, this is genuinely one of the strongest tracks in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (and Mario Kart overall), period. It might not offer a lot of challenge to veterans of the series, but crank the difficulty up to 200cc and you’ll be in heaven.
Aside from London Loop, the only other major complaint we have with Wave 3 is a familiar one: the sheer inconsistency with the visuals. While Rainbow Road, Maple Treeway, and Merry Mountain all look gorgeous, tracks like Alpine Pass and Peach Gardens stand out in the worst way possible, with oddly artificial-looking scenery and bland, flat textures. It’s a shame, but not a deal breaker, and the better-looking courses seem to have upped their game from the previous Waves.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass Wave 3 is the best update yet to the base game. The tracks on offer here are mostly stellar, and with the addition of customisable item loadouts in ‘VS Race’ modes both online and offline (which is available to all players, regardless of whether you have the Booster Course Pass), Wave 3 is a triumph and a great way to mark the halfway point of the Booster Course Pass.
Comments 66
Honestly… I think London Loop is fitting of its dull atmosphere. I mean… it’s London.
Definitely the best wave we've had yet. London Loop is a bit dull-looking but still fun.
There's still so many stellar tracks I want to see added to the game:
•Airship Fortress
•Luigi's Mansion
•Mushroom City
•Moonview Highway
•Koopa Cape
•Shy Guy Bazaar
•Wuhu Loop
•Banshee Boardwalk
•Bowser's Castle N64
•Dino Dino Jungle
•Daisy Cruiser
•Sherbet Land N64
•Rosalina's Ice World
•Dry Dry Ruins
I could keep going, but these are some of my top picks. Many of these probably won't make the cut, sadly. I'm mostly counting on Luigi's Mansion and Airship Fortress; if we don't get those two, I'll be devastated.
I'd say I enjoyed London Loop more than Berlin Byways. Both were fine, though. I don't hate them like I do Tokyo blur--that track is garbage. You're from JAPAN, Nintendo! How do you mess up TOKYO!?
Custom Items is amazing. No more ink.
Now can we get custom car parts that would be cool or even more stuff to unlock because really just new tracks are not a huge replay value. I’m just thinking of new stuff they could add. At least we get new tracks awesome.
They have added something besides tracks? Gotta put Pokemon down and look!
I used to hate Rainbow Road tracks with a burning passion since many of them don't have side railings to keep players from falling off. But now that they look positively gorgeous with their scenery on the Switch, the difficulty no longer bothers me.
@Not_Soos Airhsip Fortress, Dino Dino Jungle, Daisy hills, and Mario circuit (3ds)are the top on my list NOT already in MK8. I don't expect Daisy Hills or Mario Circuit because they're too similar to Royal raceway (I think that's its name,? I'm sure you know the one I mean with hot air balloons). I wouldn't hold my breath for Luigis Mansion for similar reasons, though hopefully I'm wrong. My two absolute long shots are the two Wuhu levels from 7 which are fantastic.
3DS Rainbow Road puts every other Rainbow Road to shame. Not just the best RR, it's one of the greatest MK tracks ever, period.
The author called Mushroom Gorge a "bona-fide classic," so now I'm scared this new pack is actually terrible.
Mushroom gorge, coconut mall and now maple treeway, my three favorites, are all in. Am I dreaming?
The 3DS Rainbow Road is one of my fav all time tracks in Mario Kart. Probably my fav actually if I think carefully.
This sounds far more like it. A wee shame about the bland mobile phone port track visuals but I'd much rather have them kn my Switch than not.
Good stuff. Cheers for the review.
Ok am I absolutely nuts here or do all of these new wave bonus tracks have slightly more slippery/floaty mechanics than the main game? The new cups all feel JUST A BIT off especially when playing them back to back with the originals.
Is there an option to create our own cups or is it just the one by one course selection?
@Ray64 I felt that way but I assumed it was just because I hadn’t played for a while, interesting to hear that others thought that too though.
Two things:
"Exceptionally dull"? When I saw London Loop on your gameplay video, it looked like great fun, especially the prominence of famous landmarks (if a little complex). But maybe this is just the fact I live near it. Even so, it definitely seems better than Tokyo and even NYC.
And how come this only gets a mini review compared to the first 2 waves?
I've been so busy playing so many other games that I haven't touched Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and all the new tracks. I should dust it off soon and give it another go.
What in the world are you talking about with Peach Gardens? It's probably the best looking track in the wave! Replacing many of the Tour assets and practically all of the textures means it looks on par with the base game tracks. Rock Rock Mountain is the only rough looking course, while Berlin Byways looks more like a Wave 2 track, but even London Loop looks really nice.
Never mind the courses - we can FINALLY switch off blue shells and lightning.
There is much rejoicing in our household this evening.
PLEASE bring Frappe Snowland to Mk8d!
They had it on N64, DS, and tour!
Just played Baby Park in 200cc VS mode with only Bullet Bills. I still don't know what just happened
@echoplex Sounds about as close to time travel as we're ever gonna get
@GraniteFraggle You mean switch off everything but blue shells? Sounds good to me!
Completely disagree about London Loop. It's a fun course to play on and it is a fairly interesting route. The different laps mixes things up and there is enough variety across it to keep me interested.
I would definitely put it above Berlin Byways which definitely has less going on, apart from the last lap, but even then, London Loop is still better than it. In fact, I was probably quite bored of Berlin Byways towards the end of the 2nd lap.
Finally got around to playing it and can confirm: this wave's pretty rad.
I think my favourites after only playing each track once would probably be Berlin Bypass (surprising amount of twists and turns that constantly kept me on my toes) and Maple Treeway (it's basically the same but it looks and sounds gorgeous: what more could you want?) with other close contenders being Boo Lake, Merry Mountain and my beloved 7 Rainbow Road. After feeling a bit disappointed overall with W-2, I'm happy to say that W-3 has reinvigorated my hype for the BCP. Can't wait for W-4 around March time!
They only needed to add Maple Treeway for a 10/10 from me.
They are all good, but the only real standout for me is Berlin. Disappointed with Rainbow Road - they made the music worse than it was and also the visuals are somehow less appealing than in MK7.
Really solid section over all. I was not expecting Peach Gardens to have that backwards third lap, and as someone who was raised on Mario Kart DS, that got a smile out of me. Halfpipes work great as well, was not expecting them to be so seamless. In general, they used antigrav much more, which is nice to see. Least favorite course is probably London Loop. It sure is a city course, but otherwise, all the courses are great to outstanding.
Since they added a new option for races, new vehicles or perhaps even drivers may yet happen. Here's hoping.
Favorite was Peach gardens, one of my favorite tracks from DS. I feel they did it justice.
I think with both Ninja Hideaway and Merry Mountain lacking the "Tour" stamp, it's pretty clear that those tracks were designed for Mario Kart 8 DLC (or Mario Kart 9) but were first released in Tour for whatever reason. Possibly Nintendo were waiting for MK8 sales to slow down or something.
Having never played Mario Kart Tour, I personally really enjoy the "real life cities" tracks from that game, including London Loop. I like how all three laps are different for all of them.
London was a botched opportunity. No rainy lap? Could’ve been awesome. And I’ve also never seen them score the corresponding music so unfittingly.
Otherwise great batch. Enjoyed Peach Gardens but cutting down the hedge maze kind of neutralized one of the stage’s cool gimmicks.
The road of Rainbow Road looks great!
A great selection of tracks. The remixed Boo Lake with the underwater section is neat.
Agree here. I'm a Tour player and think London is the worst real-location based track of the game. On the other hand, everything about Merry Mountain is a delight.
Yeah, well I’m not that enthusiastic about this selection, first two were way better, but the crazy 3ds rainbow acid space route is a nice addition for sure. Its mesmerising and shimmering as an acid space rainbow toute should be. Festive Christmas track is very disappointing on the other hand.
Christmas time,
don't let the bells end!
Seeing these screenshots only further disappoints me about this DLC. Yes, there's more courses, but you can tell Nintendo isn't even trying to make them match the game's art style. They effectively just got lazy, decided to slap plastic textures on everything, and then sold the DLC to consumers. You can argue it's a "Bargain", but it's incredibly inconsistent and it's clear Nintendo is just doing this to push expansion pass sales.
I think London Loop is really fun to drive on, personally. Lots of twists and turns and especially on the higher CC classes it just keeps you on your toes, I think it's exciting. One of my favourite courses now actually. And honestly, I think all of wave 3 is strong! Not a bad course in there. I'm also glad they made the grass look better now.
Rainbow Road 3DS gives me some serious nostalgic and emotional vibes. I love the music and visuals so much.
Regarding the new update, I didn't like how they changed the lightning power up so that players don't drop anymore while gliding...
Guys! You have to try only Blue Shells and Horns for custom items. It's so good, I mean it.
They did a great job on the 3DS Rainbow Road. I love the rainbow design they did for the road itself - really puts the other rainbow roads to shame.
Berlin Byways is Great, London Loop is dull like mentioned, and Peach Gardens is solid and liked what they did for the last lap.
The rest I haven’t played yet but am looking forward to them.
Fantastic wave. 3DS Rainbow Road and Maple Treeway are stunning. I also like the backwards final lap on Peach Gardens. I think Rock Rock Mountain is the weakest here because of the bad textures, but it's still fun to race on. The best wave so far.
I may be a minority, but I don't like the tour courses at all, they are so confusing to me and I can't learn them because each lap is different, I hate that!
also I would like an option for camera (like in MK64) in time trial in some courses like Peach Gardens the camera should be a little bit higher, you can't see the road ahead many times!
The graphics are fine. I never noticed anything bad, other that Boo Lake and 3DS Rainbow Road looked so good.
As usual with these courses, they are underwhelming at first and grow on you later after learning their traits and exploring their limits. That's especially true for new courses and those from Mario Tour, while the traditional Mario Kart classics can be affected by the the glare of our nostalgia
The one exception was Rainbow Road impressed immediately, while Peach Gardens went from ho-hum to brilliant when the final lap went the opposite direction. As one of the DS classic tracks, it needs to be good because nearly all of the DS tracks are good. Still hoping to see the likes of Airship Fortress, Banshee Boardwalk and Royal Raceway appear in future waves.
@OFFICIALMichi If you're talking online, no, you can't create custom cups. Offline it's the Versus option and you can select things like up to 48 races, difficulty, teams, and random or player track selection.
Super Circuit Rainbow Road is the best one, but they'd probably change it and make it pointless.
Being able to bounce off the edge of the track and do insane shortcuts was awesome.
So far, I like them all except for the bland Rock Rock Mountain. 3DS Rainbow Road is great but I feel that as cool as the road itself looks, it could've been more like an actual, colorful rainbow like the original. Boo Lake and Peach Gardens exceeded my expectations. London is perfectly fine. Berlin is good but I'm a little disappointed that its music isn't quite the absolute headbanger like the original in Tour.
What I want to say is that, the first half of the DLC has been released as of today and (disregarding the arcade games) we have had at least 1 track from each Mario Kart except from Double Dash!!. Why is that? I wanna see Mushroom Bridge or Mushroom City, Bowser's Castle, Waluigi Stadium and Wario Colosseum. I'd add Rainbow Road, but with that there would be 5 of those.
Really hope the next waves add some of them.
As for this wave, playing on 3DS Rainbow Road makes me miss it even more as a Smash Bros. stage. Why it didn't return for Ultimate?
From other games, I'm still hopeful for any of these: GBA Rainbow Road or DS Rainbow Road (again, same argument as before), DS Airship Fortress, Wii Moonview Highway, Wii Toad Factory, 3DS Wario Shipyard, 3DS Bowser's Castle, N64 Wario Stadium, 3DS Wuhu Loop, 3DS Maka Wuhu.
I liked the entire course assortment. I will say, Rock Rock Mountain stuck out like a sore thumb visually. It looks like a beta GameCube game upscaled to HD. The track itself is a fun remake, thankfully.
The biggest disappointment for me was Maple Treeway. It's still a ton of fun but a lot of the flair and verticalness of the Wii and 3DS versions is gone. Plus the music is nerfed hard. I guess it's just like the other Wii courses in the booster pass lol.
Rainbow Road is sharp looking….while I like the additional content, I just really think it’s time for something new with this series. It’s fun to race these tracks for a few days, but the replayability has very limited appeal to me.
Hopefully we also get some significant hardware upgrades soon too. The news that MSFT wants to put COD on Nintendo platforms is a signal that we hear something soon and the next rendition of MK comes out in the foreseeable future.
@inactive Personally I think the remix sounds better than the original
I think all of the couses look great.
surprised by london, merry mnt was underwhelming tho
3DS Rainbow Road was SO good they turned it into a stage in Smash Bros 4 3DS (and was incidentally easily one of the best stages in that version of Smash Bros.)
Can't wait to download and play on this awesome track again!
I’ll keep saying that the fact the put dlc into a Wii U port, means we potentially aren’t done getting smash ultimate fighters. I don’t think these games need updates, just more fighter, stages, etc… and dlc packs like this for mk8 are well worth it if you just like to play the games.
Nobody is going to read this so here it goes.
Played all 8 several times last night. Boo Lake, Merry Mountain and 3DS Rainbow Road were the best, hands down. Boo Lake is probably my favorite course in the whole game. It's so good. Those extremely tight turns are beyond satisfying. Merry Mountain came out at just the right time. I don't know why that one is so good but the rest of the Tour courses are hot garbage (that said the bridge in London is very fun to hit when it's up). The most disappointing courses for me were Rock Rock Mountain and Maple Treeway. I loved those courses so much on their original hardware that it was hard to live up to my expectations. Maple Treeway seemed shorter somehow, and the wigglers were absolutely no threat, and they need to be a threat for the course to be fun. Though I was glad to see the half pipe jump put back in from it's 3DS version removal. Rock Rock Mountain was dissapointing because they removed some of the fun little details to the course. The jump at the first turn was removed. Why? And again this course seemed shorter than it's original version, and to test that out I got my 3DS out and booted up Mariokart 7. Sure enough, the 3DS version is a longer course, with more satisfying jumps and details.
So Nintendo, keep it up! Except stop bringing these hot garbage dumpster fire courses from Tour. Nobody gives a ***** about Tour. Stop trying to make Tour happen.
EDIT: Just thought about this. They should have made the item blocks in Merry Mountain presents. Big whif.
Best wave by far. Really hoping DK Mountain and Wauigi Stadium make it, those were some of my favorites!
@pspooky see, and that's why we can't say tracks are objectively bad. I really liked Toad circuit and hate all three you mentioned! I shouldn't they're great, but I skip them if I have the chance! 😂
@RobotReptile The Amsterdam one's music is very unfitting as well. Amsterdam basically has they're own music genre with lots of accordeon, and that's not what we got.
But it sounds a lot better than London, that's for sure! 😂
(I think they wanted to use England's punk rock scène?)
Merry Mountain is great but Boo Lake is a huge disappointment. It’s not scary or even interesting. Needs more boo’s, a thwomp, maybe a giant dry bones and some of the planks should disappear.
@JakedaArbok Yes, i remember playing the DS version, where you actually see that final straight continuing, and wondering if you could go there...
Old skool comment here, when the last three Cups are finally all released and the mandatory updates to follow are rollout out, I hope Nintendo will release a "Complete Edition" Cart with all the DLC (and hopefully all the Mii Costumes unlocked!).
Great for collectors and Mario Kart Fans (oh and Nintendo sales so I can buy MK8/DX (WiiU/Switch Cart & Download) for the 4th time!!)
@Uncle_Franklin super circuit was terrible.
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