Mario Kart Tour has officially launched. After Nintendo franchises such as Fire Emblem and Super Mario preceded the racing game, today fans finally got to put their hands on the wildly popular multiplayer. Much like the others, Mario Kart Tour is available for iOS as well as Android devices.

Here's all you need to know about the game.

Touring across the world

Mario Kart Tour is free to download from the App Store and Google Play Store, but requires you to set up a Nintendo account (also free to make) to be played.  Once fully installed, the game asks you how you'd like to steer your little racers: with drifting enabled, or not. While the latter one is easier at first, the learning curve to master drifting isn't steep at all either and drifting does shave off a couple of seconds per lap. Furthermore, the controls are incredibly intuitive, so we'd recommend to enable drifting.

In a quick tutorial you learn that racers have synergy with 'their' tracks, and that they have affinity for a certain item as well. If you're on a racer's favorite track, grabbing an item box will grant you not one but three items such as bananas and shield to throw. It's a dice roll that can turn out to be pretty powerful: if you roll three of the same item, a 'Frenzy' is started during which you unlock an items super power.

The tracks you can play on in Mario Kart Tour are updated every two weeks with a new location and accompanying tracks, which visit old places like the Dino Dino Jungle (Mario Kart Double Dash) and Mario Circuit 1 (SNES). Nintendo is visiting places in many countries, but starts in the capital of the world: New York City.

Endless unlockables

So how many tracks can you play in a Tour? In the New York Tour, a total of sixteen cups are unlockable, each with four available tracks. Those aren't all available immediately, however. By completing tracks players can earn up to five Grand Stars, depending on how many point they earned in a track. These Grand Stars open the doors to new Cups.

But that's not all the players have to grind for in order to experience the game fully. Different speeds are unlocked relatively easily—winning a track at 50cc unlocks 100cc for all other tracks, and winning a track at 100cc unlocks 150cc etc. It gets trickier once you get to the different characters, who each have their own cars and gliders. These all have different traits - the rarer one slightly more flashy and impressive ones than the starters.

Credit Kart Tour

It's at the plethora of possibilities in Mario Kart Tour that players are confronted with what seems inevitable in the current mobile game era: a freemium model. After you complete the first race you're awarded a handful of Coins and 20 Rubies. The game forces players to spend some of the currency immediately, showing players that they can unlock new characters, cars and gliders with a flick of the finger in a lootbox system.

Of course, the Rubies can also be earned otherwise. Mario Kart Tour offers a log in reward, alternating between 100 Coins and 5 Rubies. However, they're earned much faster by whipping out the wallet.

In the end, you can play Mario Kart Tour without paying as much as you can play most popular games with the freemium model. Mastering tracks by playing them again on higher cc's is a worthwile challenge, and you can keep levelling the favorite characters you own. The Tour systems seems promising, and gives Nintendo an abundance of content options to keep the game alive for months to come.