Gaming Roundup | We get hands-on with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

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This week's gaming roundup is fully dedicated to the super cool Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which was just released on October 16. Nintendo was kind enough to send us a kit for review, so we've been playing around with it throughout the week, and we have some thoughts!

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Mario Kart Live isn't a traditional video game. It might be easiest to think of this kit as part toy/part video game. What you're buying when you pick up Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is the "toy" part of the product. It's actually an RC car (you have the choice of either Mario or Luigi and their respective karts), a charging cable, and four cardboard gates to set up and drive through. Where the video game aspect comes in, is in the downloadable software that you can grab right from the Nintendo eShop on your Nintendo Switch. The download is free, but it won't work without the RC car and the rest of the kit. How do these two things come together? Well, to be honest, that part is pretty magical.

Thanks to a little video camera attached to the kart, the downloadable software on the Switch allows you to drive the kart around your house while experiencing a first-person karts-eye view of your space on your TV (or directly on your Switch, if you're in handheld mode). It also uses incredible augmented reality (or mixed reality, if you prefer) technology to overlay a ton of Mario Kart staples that you know and love. Think Pokémon Go multiplied by 100.

Here's how it works: You take the cardboard gates and you set them up in any drivable configuration you'd like inside your home. Once you've got a setup you'd like to try, you use your Switch to drive your RC kart up to the first gate, and you can then "create your course." To do this, you simply drive the route you want your track to be, while making sure to hit all of the gates. On screen, you're seeing augmented reality paint being dragged across your floor as a way to identify the track you're creating. Once you've created a full loop, your track is finished and you can start racing!

Like in previous Mario Kart games, you still race in Grand Prix style events. Unlike in previous Mario Kart games, rather than the tracks changing shape every race, the changes in Mario Kart Live come in the form of the AR overlays and obstacles. You can choose to re-organize your gates and map new courses each race if you want, but mercifully, you aren't required to.