There’s clearly still a lot more to Mario Kart World than Nintendo has openly shared, as players have discovered huge vehicles just sitting around the courses waiting for you to jump into them.
Highlighted by YouTube creator GetMadz on Twitter, one of these vehicles you’ll be able to jump into is some kind of beefy boat, allowing you to charge around on water. While the footage shared shows this boat being accessible in the new Free Roam mode, GetMadz notes that he also “found it in a race but didn’t manage to get into it,” so yes, you’ll be able to use it when racing against others.
I got to play Mario Kart World today and found something cool :] pic.twitter.com/PXfWM560PhApril 11, 2025
GetMadz isn’t the only one who’s encountered this feature at one of the Switch 2 hands-on events. Over on Reddit, another player shares that they discovered “some big special vehicles with question marks that you can drive inside of and possess.” They continue: “In one session, I became a big truck and was boosting around knocking everything out of the way, and then later I was a large boat squashing Cheep Cheep in the sea.”
As others have pointed out, we actually got a tiny little glimpse of this during the Nintendo Switch 2 news from earlier this month – specifically in Mario Kart World’s reveal trailer. At the timestamp below, we briefly see Birdo drive into the back of the aforementioned truck in the middle of a race, which is parked on the side of the course, until the bright pink icon descends upon it and charges through a barrier to bring further chaos to the road.
Right now, it’s not clear how many more of these vehicles there might be or how long you can actually use them for at any given point. In GetMadz’s footage, we see the boat disappear from existence once he drives back to land, but that might just be for the simple reason that, y’know, you can’t drive boats on roads. It seems likely that there’d be some limits in place to stop you from using them for an entire race, but we’ll just have to see.
Maybe Nintendo will give us a few more details this week during the Mario Kart World Direct, which is set to air on April 17. It was already teased that “there is more to Free Roam mode” than has been discussed by Nintendo so far and that fans should tune into the Direct to find out what that’s all about, so perhaps this is part of that. Either way, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
Mario Kart World is one of the most exciting upcoming Switch 2 games, and it’ll also be available on the new console’s launch date on June 5.
