The player count is the whole decision
Nintendo publishes a players field on every store page, and on these two it says something very different. Mario Kart World is listed at 1-4 players on a single system, 2-8 by local wireless and 2-24 online. Donkey Kong Bananza is listed at single system (1-2), and that is the end of the list.
That is not a detail, it is the design. Mario Kart World is the game you put on when six people are in the living room and one of them has never held a controller. Bananza is the game somebody plays for an hour after work, for two months. Both are very good at their own job. Neither does the other one’s job.
A practical warning follows from the Mario Kart number, and it catches gift buyers out every December: four players on one console means four controllers, and no Switch 2 comes with four. Our controller-counting guide does the arithmetic for every Switch model — if you are buying the racing game for a household, the honest second half of that present is a spare pair of pads.
What “1-2 players” actually means in Bananza
Worth being precise about, because “1-2 players” reads like a versus mode and it is not one. Nintendo describes the co-op as one player controls Donkey Kong while the other can be Pauline, riding on DK’s shoulder, using her powerful vocal blasts to clear a path and zap baddies.
In gift terms that is a specific and rather lovely thing: it is the mode that lets a six-year-old or a grandparent join a game they could never have driven themselves, with no way to lose and nothing to learn. It is not the mode that keeps two teenagers busy while they try to beat each other. Player two is a passenger with a useful job, not an opponent.
The rating gap, and whether it matters
Mario Kart World is rated E (Everyone) with the descriptors Mild Fantasy Violence and Users Interact. Donkey Kong Bananza is rated E10+ (Everyone 10+) with Fantasy Violence and In-Game Purchases.
For a child under ten that is a real distinction, and it is the main reason this page does not simply recommend the cheaper game. For a teenager or an adult it means nothing at all. If the recipient is a child and you are not the parent, the E rating is the safer place to be; our age ratings guide explains what the letter and the small print under it actually cover, and why the descriptors matter more than the letter.
The “In-Game Purchases” descriptor on Bananza deserves one sentence too. It means the game is capable of selling something after you have bought it. It does not mean the game needs more money to be complete, and the main adventure does not.
The download size nobody mentions until it is a problem
Nintendo lists Mario Kart World at 22.2 GB and Donkey Kong Bananza at 9 GB. A Switch 2 ships with 256 GB of internal storage, so a new console takes either one without anybody thinking about it.
It stops being free after a year of ownership. If you are buying a digital copy for a console that has been in daily use since launch, the room may already be gone — and the Switch 2 only accepts microSD Express cards, not the card from an older Switch. Our Switch 2 memory card guide covers which cards qualify, and what a Switch 2 really costs prices up the whole present including the card.
If you cannot choose, buy on the room
Our standing advice on this pair is to stop thinking about the games and think about the room they will be played in.
A house with children, siblings, or regular visitors: Mario Kart World, every time. It is the one that gets switched on when people arrive, and the extra $10 buys a game nobody has to be persuaded to play. Our Mario Kart World review goes into whether its open world justifies being the priciest game on the shelf.
One adult, or one teenager who plays alone: Bananza. It is a bigger single-player game than Mario Kart will ever be, it costs less, and it will not sit unopened waiting for other people to be free.
A parent who wants to play with a young child: this is the one case where the answer is genuinely Bananza despite the E10+ rating, because the Pauline mode is built for exactly that pairing. Read the descriptors, decide for your own child, and if you would rather not, Mario Kart World with the driving assists on does much the same job.
And if the console in the house is not actually a Switch 2 — which happens more often than gift buyers expect, because three different machines all get called “a Switch” — neither of these games will run at all. Our compatibility guide runs the four checks to do before buying any Switch game, and the Switch 2 games list covers the rest of the shelf.
