Mario Party Superstars Review – IGN

With 23 years of history under its belt, the Mario Party series has certainly had its fair share of ups and downs, with its highs representing some of the most fun I’ve had playing local multiplayer games with friends, and its lows are … well, almost the opposite of that. Fortunately, Mario Party Superstars is a celebration of the best moments this long-running franchise has ever had. Collect 100 of the funniest minigames, five great boards from the first three Mario Party games, and a combination of some of the best rules, mechanics, and quality of life improvements in a single Switch game. It’s still surprisingly boring without friends, and not all minigames are worthy of the “superstar” label, but overall, this is simply the best Mario Party it’s been in a long time.

Super Mario Party of 2018 represented a “back to basics” shift for the series, and Mario Party Superstars has taken that idea several steps further by focusing on the days of N64 and the early days of the GameCube. There are no motion-controlled minigames, no item capsules, no custom dice blocks for specific characters, no friends to recruit, and of course no party car. Just four players, each of whom takes turns rolling the dice, moving around a virtual game board, playing minigames to earn coins, and using those coins to buy stars. And maybe it’s because it’s been a long time since we’ve had a Mario Party game without some kind of additional gimmick, but this simplicity is incredibly refreshing, and I certainly didn’t miss having something in there to mix up the formula.

It helps that all five boards are some of the best designed in Mario Party history. Yoshi’s Tropical Island is a great starter board with an easy-to-understand layout and a fun twist that involves exchanging star markers between its two islands – it is sure to lead to heartbreak and euphoria in equal measure among your friends. Space Land, meanwhile, is a resource for when I want to play without any game-changing board mechanics and just get that pure virtual board game experience; Peach’s Birthday Cake offers a completely different style of play by holding the star in one position and sprinkling spots where you can plant coins or star-stealing piranha plants; Woody Woods forces you to think of various movements thanks to his constantly changing arrows that send you down different paths; and finally, Horror Land is one of my favorites due to its fun day / night mechanic and a King Boo that can allow you to steal a star from all other players … if you get a master key, 150 coins and you can to reach it while it is at night. It’s a crazy hail condition to win, but if you can handle it, it’s sure to be a story you and your friends won’t soon forget.

Screenshots of Mario Party Superstars

Developer NdCube has done a fantastic job of bringing both the look and sound of these boards up to modern standards. The character models are virtually identical to how they looked in Super Mario Party three years ago, but the remade boards are impeccably detailed, with Peach’s Birthday Cake clearly standing out thanks to the hyper-realistic, delicious-looking snacks that decorate the linear path around. the cake. It also cannot be understated that not only have all the boards and nearly all 100 minigames undergone dramatic visual transformations, but they have also garnered new instrumental arrangements for each accompanying song. You can even unlock the songs from the store and listen to the classic and modern versions of each in Data House, which is great because while the songs on N64 still stick around, their modernized versions are even better.

But while the tables are impressive, the downside is that there are still only five of them. That it is a step above the sad four that Super Mario Party offered, but still not on par with almost every other numbered Mario Party game in the past, which has almost always included six. Even adding one more board from Mario Party 3 would have gone a long way in making the pack feel more robust, and would have balanced the balance of the boards from all three N64 games at the same time.

Minigame madness

At the heart of any good Mario Party game are its minigames, and thankfully almost none of the 100 that were selected from each numbered entry in the series disappoint. You’ve got your all-time classics like Bumper Balls, Shy Guy Says, Hot Rope Jump, Revers-A-Bomb, and Booksquirm, just to name a few favorites. What makes these games so great is their sheer simplicity, plus a little added twist. Bumper Balls, for example, is literally just a game about throwing your opponents off a small circular platform while riding a bouncing ball. But the twist is that in order to take down an opponent, you have to put yourself in a dangerous position by increasing momentum and hitting them near the edge, which puts you in prime position to be taken down.

And then you also have some selections that you might not come up with right away, but that end up being great selections because of the variety they bring to the table. Honeycomb Havoc, a game where you only take turns picking one or two fruits at a time and trying not to be the one forced to grab a honeycomb, may not be the most exciting game in the world based on what happens in the screen. , but the metagame that is happening between you and your friends, since everyone can see their defeat or victory several moves ahead, makes it one of my favorites of the whole group.

Very few, if any, are complete failures. That said, there are a couple of minigames that are so close to each other that including them both feels like a waste of space. Leaf Leap and What Goes Up make you run upwards jumping platforms as fast as you can; Pokey Pummel and Mecha Marathon make you press a button (or buttons) really fast; and Roll Call and Goomba Spotting allow you to count the number of things that appear on the screen. They are all fun games, and none are completely identical, but when you consider that classic minigames like Platform Peril, Locked Out, and Running of the Bulb didn’t make the final cut, it’s hard not to be a bit disappointed by these handfuls. of doubles.

My only other complaint with the selection of minigames is that many of the 1v3 minigames are so skewed to favor the individual player or the group of three that it doesn’t really make it much fun for either of them. In Piranha’s Pursuit, for example, it doesn’t even feel like you’re part of the minigame when you’re on the team of three, Archer-ival actively feels terrible when you’re not the goalkeeper, and Tidal Toss feels almost impossible to win as a solo player. if even one of the team of three is good. Oh, and there’s the iconic Tug o ‘War destroying the N64 controller, which actually requires an in-game warning to advise you not to use the palm of your hand to rotate the joystick to avoid damaging your Joy-Con. or Your hand.

With that said, there are a couple of genuinely cool 1v3 minigames, like Tackle Takedown, which is a soccer minigame in which the team of three tries to tackle the single player who is capable of using three bursts of speed to try and get them out of their boots. But most of them are disappointing and I always groaned when I saw one approach.

Bringing it all back

Mario Party Superstars has not long been completely new to the series, which is completely fine by me considering it brings in so many things that I love and missed from the recent Mario Party games. Like, for example, stars that cost 20 coins instead of 10, which was a big problem I had with Super Mario Party. It was too easy for everyone to indulge in the stars in that game, which really hampered the real strategy of the board game and placed too much importance on recruiting friends to bolster their dice rolls. Plus, dueling minigames are back and help make the last five turns that much more exciting by giving you and your opponents the opportunity to challenge each other in high-stakes one-on-one minigames with staked coins at stake. And of course Chance Time is back too, which introduces all sorts of chaos into the mix.

Bonus stars can also be turned on, off, and even set in the classic style of always hanging out with the ones who collect the most coins, win the most minigames, and / or land in the most event spaces, but the only truth. of Mario Party is that even despite all those options, luck will always be a factor. Try as you might, you can never completely remove your control over each game, and that’s part of the magic. There will absolutely be times when the person who won the fewest minigames will end up winning the overall, stealing a victory from the person who held the lead for most of the match in the closing seconds. And yes, that may feel bad for some people right now, but the joy I get from Mario Party Superstars doesn’t come from winning or losing. It comes from the hilarious interactions it brings out from me and my friends, which it does with a reliability few games can match.

Playing locally in the same room is obviously ideal, but Mario Party Superstars also has a pretty solid set of online options. Standard Party mode has random player matchmaking and private lobbies that allow you to invite specific friends, and if someone leaves, their character will be controlled by a bot until they can reconnect; A fun selection of emoticon stickers can even let your rivals know exactly how you feel about Boo stealing your hard-earned stars. There is also Mount Minigames, which offers a variety of modes that allow you to play minigames on demand. In the limited amount of testing I was able to do before launch, lag certainly played a notable factor in one of my sessions, especially in more reflex-intensive games like Hot Rope Jump and Bill Blasters, but playing online was generally fun. and useful in general. .