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Mario Kart: Double Dash Game Review

Mario Kart: Double Dash is a 2003 kart racing video game developed and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. It is the fourth entry in the series and an improvement upon its predecessors.

When this game was released, it received strong reviews with some reservations. While it’s not recognized today as among the best entries in the series, I would say that it’s better or at least on par with ‘Mario Kart 64’. The two overall are clearly superior to the other two entries made before 2003.

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Graphically, this was the best-looking Mario Kart game to this date. It’s a 3D game, but one that featured fantastic character designs and polygons that have aged surprisingly well. Clearly, the game doesn’t have the most detailed backgrounds, but I loved it for its vibrant, colorful and cartoony aesthetic. Some of the tracks were exceptionally well designed.

The sound and score fared worse in my opinion. While the overall sound design was fine, it wasn’t truly memorable. As for the score, it lacked the more striking and ambitious themes that we’ve come to expect from most Mario games. The result is a soundtrack that is definitely a lot of fun, but one that did not stay with me with the exception of the Rainbow Road theme that was absolutely phenomenal.

Let’s talk about the gameplay. Most of the main gameplay mechanics were repeated here – the power-ups, drifting and different modes to play in. The main difference here was the addition of another character in one kart. You can choose two different characters out of twenty in total to have in your kart, which made for such a fun trial-and-error game where you have to test how different characters work with each other. I played single player, so I ended up controlling both characters, but both of them do their own thing and lend something of essence to the team, which was quite an interesting idea that mostly worked.

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I ended up using either Mario and Luigi or Bowser Jr. and Yoshi. These characters were the best ones in terms of their power-ups. The voice acting is wonderful and it was great hearing all the famous voices from all the different characters and some of their exclamations were so funny and/or endearing.

There are multiple different vehicles on your disposal and the variety is quite commendable for the time. Each and every vehicle has different stats, so finding the right one is crucial. I preferred driving those with highest speed and weight as those two are the most important factors for me personally. Once again the Grand Prix was a lovely experience. I managed to finish all of the cups in all three difficulty levels and I found the highest difficulty to be quite demanding. This game doesn’t use rubber banding unlike its predecessor, which was refreshing, but still too often it favored one kart so that it would be almost impossible to beat them. And of course if you get hit just once, it may impede your victory.

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Mario Kart: Double Dash has numerous great power-ups, but it lacks new or unique ones. I appreciated the boost mushrooms’ frequency and the Red Shells were clearly highly valuable, but Lightning was super annoying when it happened to me. As for the tracks, they weren’t super original with the exception of some particularly memorable ones. Daisy Cruiser was so unique and vibrant, perfectly utilizing the ship setting. Dry Dry Desert was another standout that was so atmospheric. Mushroom City was cool and different in its nighttime scenery. Sherbet Land was solid, Rainbow Road was reliably superb and DK Mountain was by far the best of the bunch as it used its montane and volcanic imagery to the fullest effect.