WIthout the ranked races (which requires a server to keep the leaderboard), there is no fun in offline mode.

The better the gear you have, the harder your opponents will be. What changes with how much you pay is how many points you get.

Points determine how many stars you get per race, but clearing up all stars in the tour is easy. The only part where the score really matters is on the weekly ranked Cups (the sets of 3 races) which groups 20 players and the top 3 best scorers get promoted to a higher level and 5-20 get sent one level down. There is also a “friends ranking” which doesn’t give any prize but it’s a nice way to get some friendly competition between your friends.

To their credit, the game used to be quite playable even for non-subscribers and now that they are shutting it down, they stopped charging and are giving all benefits to everyone.

Who is playing a bad mobile MK game instead of playing a console one

I was. The mobile game is totally different from the console, but that doesn’t mean it was bad.