Mario Party Superstars Review (Switch)

For years, fans of the Mario Party series have been begging Nintendo to go back to the roots of what made the series great; no cars, no weird new modes, not just a collection of minigames that when presented in a vacuum lose all context or purpose, just Mario characters running around a board grabbing stars and destroying friendships. Super Mario Party definitely took those comments seriously, but just a handful of playable boards and limitations in other areas definitely left some die-hard classic fans wanting.

In that spirit, Mario Party Superstars seems to be Nintendo finally saying ‘okay, here it is your stinky old Mario Party. ‘ The entire game from top to bottom is 100% old school with all warts included, plus pictures of course. You have two main modes to deal with if the idea of ​​the options menu doesn’t get your engine going, namely Mario Party (!) And Mount Minigames. The latter is a method of simply playing each and every mini-game that is offered in one form or another with nothing more than a score counter that keeps track of who won and how many games.

This has always been (aside from Mario Party: Top 100) the secondary focus of any game in the series: a means of taking a quick dip into a specific minigame or simply to have something to do with friends, and sometimes even a way. for solo gamers to have fun in a way that doesn’t just replace their cold-hearted CPU friends. This time it is a fairly basic and straightforward matter. There are a few different ways you can dig into these challenges and various themed ways to see who’s the best, but they all go a long way.

But as the old saying goes, the real meat can be found in ‘Mario Party’, a mode that allows you to play Mario Party in Mario Party Superstars. Knock down a surprisingly long pipe in a clear nod to the original game that got the whole party going all the way to the board below. During said fall, you will have to choose a character for each of the four players, with CPU filling any space that is not occupied by the meat machines that you have selected to end your friendships.

There are also a somewhat nice amount of options for tweaking a game’s specs, like changing the type of bonus stars that will turn the tide at the end of the game, which is complete nonsense because I you got the most coins and that’s way more important than landing in the event spaces, plus how many turns the game will last (up to 30), if the minigames should tell you what to do, and if someone should start the game with a star handicap. It’s not a list of options that will set the world on fire, but it’s a decent enough offering that you’ll be able to happily adjust to suit the needs of your group.

But then we come across the most important decision, and that is the board to play on. At launch, there are five boards available (but recent developments suggest there could be even more to come). Mario Party is represented by Yoshi’s Tropical Island and Peach’s Birthday Cake, Mario Party 2 has Space Land and Horror Land, and finally Mario Party 3 has Woody Woods. The last three we mentioned are all pretty great, with a variety of branching pathways and fun event spaces that can be used to completely ruin any and all relationships you might have. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the other two.

Yoshi’s tropical island is penalty fee. It has some branching paths and the star may be in one of two places, but it’s a bit simplistic really. Peach’s birthday cake, on the other hand, is a really weird inclusion. It’s essentially a loop with an immovable star, so it does nothing more than try to roll high enough to circle the board as quickly as possible. There’s a secondary loop that takes him into a more dangerous area with Bowser in it, and going this way will allow him to spin faster to potentially grab another star, but our time with him was actively boring, and we just wish we did. he had played another board.

One thing we could have done, but didn’t do because reviewing games requires you not to overlook something just because it’s boring, is to go out and come back to that particular game later. We knew this was an option and at first we assumed it was a single option to resume an old party or start over and forget that game in Space Land where you rolled a five when you just used a Triple Dice item. Not so, as the game will save up to ten active games at a time, which is a big deal if you’re craving a 30-turn game but have an urgent breakfast meeting that you just can’t miss.

On the other hand, if you’re playing a shorter game and your croissant and coffee link is canceled, you can even add turns to extend the game beyond its original lifespan up to a maximum of 30 turns. Nice!

And the games won’t even take as long as you might think, as player movement is much faster than in the past, particularly for CPUs. Changing the text speed to ‘fast’ can cause you to miss what a computer controlled player accomplished on their turn if you get distracted for a brief moment, and that is happiness. The last thing anyone wants to do is wait around for Luigi the seat warmer to be hanging around trying to figure out which item he wants to buy with his AI monkey mind, and Nintendo has made sure it’s as painless as possible.

The selection of minigames is also top-notch. There are classics all the way up to Mario Party 10 included, and while there are one or two that don’t hit the mark for us, the vast majority are absolutely excellent. You can even choose to limit the minigames you’ll encounter when you’re doing that pipe-dropping charade we mentioned earlier, so if you just want to play N64 minigames, you can. You can even narrow it down to GameCube minigames, or those that require skill, the ones that are more suitable for families. It is difficult to argue so much.

Despite all this, an opportunity to inject something new or even relatively modern into the formula seems to have been missed. We’re not talking about race-canceling cars or suggestively motion-controlled minigames, but everything mechanical about this new entry is old. There are no custom dice for each character like Super Mario Party, no allied phones, no new minigames at all. It doesn’t feel so much like a step backward as a lack of confidence in anything that might upset the classic formula. Don’t get us wrong, old Mario Party is well Mario Party, but such a radical change from forcing unwanted new mechanics on players to a complete absence of any new ideas, even as options that could be disabled, is a bit disappointing.

But when it comes down to it, Mario Party Superstars is simply fun. There’s a good reason people have been clamoring for a return to old ways, and while it may be a bit too Sure in our opinion, we have exactly that return here. We couldn’t tell you the last time we had so much fun with a Mario Party game, and even if the board offerings are a bit limited, a 30-turn excursion through Horror Land is hard to beat, and that’s even if Birdo is a cheater and couldn’t have gotten so many stars by legitimate means.

And the best thing about all this is that everything can be done online with friends, or even strangers. Be it the daily challenge of Mount Minigames or the much more engaging perspective of Mario Party, it works almost as well online as it does as a tech hermit. The only caveat is that games tend to take just a hair longer as other players peruse the map, spending time deciding which item to buy from the store, and a bit of a delay between multiple rolls of the dice. It’s very small and doesn’t skip the beat when it comes to minigames, which is the most important thing. It may be a feature that should have been long overdue, but this time they got it right for release.

On the presentation side of things, Mario Party Superstars is absolutely great. The main menu is one of many callbacks to the first game in the series, the classic board music has been rerecorded to make it much more modern on the ears (although you can choose to listen to the classic N64 tracks if you do. want), and every character and setting is just right precious. Even the minigames that load up-close instantly feature some jaw-dropping views that are used only as a backdrop. Sometimes lighting gives some objects a slightly plastic look, but most of the time everything looks as you would expect and about twice as pretty.

The animations are super engaging too, like DK clasping his hands over his bowed head while praying he didn’t press the lever that will blow up Bowser’s head-shaped bomb, or Waluigi flinging his signature pink into the air and catching it in his mouth, or DK giving himself a loud applause every time he wins a minigame, or DK subtly scratching his head with a finger as he tries to decide which item to use. It’s about DK, honey.

And to top it all, everything is happening at a super solid 60fps. Every roll of the dice, every minigame, every beating in the real world to the person who just activated Bowser Revolution with three coins while they are two spaces away from a Boo and now they have enough to steal the Star you just received, never drops a frame.