I haven’t played too much of the game, but most of the comments I agree with. I do however think it is “casual friendly” in that the game is very lax about the direction motions needed to do basic moves, to the point where its easy to trigger a DP move instead of QCF, and vice versa.

In this sense, it is casual friendly since the basic specials can be pulled off with relative ease. Certainly, there is a lot of “depth” in the moves, which Sirlin regards as unnecessarily complicated moves.

Having playing online for a while now though, I would say my personal rating would tend towards the 9/10 mark. The AI may cheat too much in 150cc (I dont know, I haven’t tried single-player 150cc yet) but for someone who loved previous iterations of the game, the online mode is near perfect.

The only real criticisms I have is functionality that I guess was never going to be there: stuff like voice communication with opponents and ability to customize the items/rules. Even without those additions this game continues to draw me in at the expense of GTAIV. Given the heapings of praise that game is receiving, that has to say something about the quality of Mario Kart Wii.