The evolution continues
With the Mario Kart games there is always the question of how you balance the items. Make them too powerful and it makes it easier for less skilled players to win with luck, which is nice for casual games with friends, but is annoying for veterans. Compared to Mario Kart Wii, MK 7 has fewer items that will annoy the leader of the race. While the Blue Koopa Shell is still around, there are fewer items that automatically hits you and take away your items. Instead Retro added the Racoon tail to knock people on your side and the fire flower to shoot fireballs towards the people right ahead of you. In general I think they found a good balance.
What really separates Mario Kart 7 from its predecessors is the courses. In my opponion, Mario Kart 7 has the best collection of courses yet. When making a list of my favorite 10 MK courses I discovered that 4 of them are MK 7 courses and 4 of them appear in MK 7 as retro courses. Among the remaining 12 new courses the level is generally quite high and among the old courses, many of them have been slightly tweeked in a way that improves them. Retro has done a good job of making courses that work well with the controls and gimmicks of the game and the artistic design and music is top notch as well.
I would like to mention in particular the courses Rainbow Road, Wuhu Island Loop and Wuhu Mountain Loop. Those are long courses with that you drive around only once (but has two checkpoint for convenience). The Rainbow Road is my favorite rainbow course in the series so far. It has some dangerous turns, a good gliding part and even a part where you drive on the moon and gravity is notably weaker than usually.
The game's main mode for singleplayer is the good old gran prix. Each of the eight cups are played on three difficulty levels and after that you unlock a mode where the courses are mirrored. For extra challenge you also get a rank based on your performance, with three stars being the best rank. If you get at least one star in every cup on every difficulty, a star will be shown after your user name when playing online. You can also get two or three stars after your name. The beauty of this system is that it provides challenge whether you are six years old and it winning on 50cc is hard enough or an MK veteran trying to get three stars in every cup.
The time trial also has more potensial to be enjoyed by people on various skill levels. For each course there is shown a curve over how challenging it is to get a given time. There are also one easy and one difficult staff ghost. The three most logical goals are to beat the easy ghost, to do better than average difficulty and to beat the difficult ghost. As a Mario Kart veteran I appreciate how hard the difficult staff ghosts are. While I beat all the 32 staff ghosts in Mario Kart DS I have so far beat 8 of the hardest ghosts in MK 7 and I have had some enjoyable rounds trying over and over to beat them and finally do it.
As for multiplayer, the game has followed Mario Kart Wii's model for online. You can race against random strangers and build up your rating or you can race against your friends by exchanging friend codes. You can also play multiplayers locally using download play. The biggest difference online is that the maximum number of players per race in Mario Kart 7 is 8, not 12 like in Mario Kart Wii.
One addition that I feel added nothing to the game is the ability to customize your kart by unlocking the wheels, the body and the glider for each kart separately and then combine them however you like. The game also takes a step backwards by removing the challenge mode that was first introduced in Mario Kart DS.
Bottom line is it's a really enjoyable game. Both gameplay, graphic and music is masterfully handled and the game is an exception from the norm in that I prefer to play it with the 3D effects turn on.