Mario Golf: World Tour

Genre: Sports (Golf)

Players: 1-6 Competitive Tournament (Local Wireless / Online)

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Review:

Mario Golf: World Tour, released in 2014, is the requisite 3DS entry in Nintendo’s long-running family-friendly cartoony Golf franchise.

The presentation in Mario Golf: World Tour is absolutely top-notch, with gorgeous, detailed, colorful 3D environments and extraordinarily well-animated 3D characters. In addition, this game has some really great sound design, nice voice work for the characters’ outbursts, and everything is extremely well-polished. While I wouldn’t go quite as far as to say this is one of the best-looking games on the Nintendo 3DS, it definitely looks fantastic, and I would argue that the colorful presentation is in many ways more appealing then more technically-impressive entries in the series, including Mario Golf: Super Rush on the Nintendo Switch.

Another area where World Tour puts Super Rush to shame (and indeed, outpaces every other entry in the series as well) is content – World Tour contains 10 courses in the game, with 6 available as paid DLC (in three separate installments, or all together for $15), with a total number of holes coming to over 200. There’s some good variety in these courses as well. Unfortunately, this wide variety of courses is not available at the game’s outset – they need to be unlocked through the campaign.

In addition to this, players have a few different game modes to select from. They can opt to play a quick game of golf, set up a tournament, or participate in a longer campaign with RPG-style mechanics, though not an RPG-style story like we got in Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color or its more recent spiritual successor, Golf Story.

Of course, all of this hardly matters if the gameplay isn’t good, and as it happens, Mario Golf: World Tour may have my favorite gameplay of any Golf game I have ever played. Players can opt to use traditional controls or shortcut buttons on the touchscreen, and players are given a wide variety of accessible options to adjust their shot, with some clear readouts to indicate the various factors and how they will affect your shot. You’re also given a decent amount of different camera angles to ensure you can correctly judge how to make your shot.

Unfortunately, there is one issue with Mario Golf: World Tour that I can complain about, though it can’t really be helped – the online lobbies are deserted, meaning that if you want to find some human competition, you’ll have to find other local players with a Nintendo 3DS and a copy of the game. However, this can’t very well be blamed on the game – it did come out 8 years ago as of this writing, after all.

Honestly, Mario Golf: World Tour is a game that I consider the gold standard of not just the Mario Golf series, but quite possibly Golf games in general. It looks great, sounds great, has plenty of content, great options, and it plays wonderfully. If you are a Nintendo 3DS owner who enjoys Golf games, consider this an absolute must-buy. And be sure to download the extra courses while you still can!

tl;dr – Mario Golf: World Tour is the Nintendo 3DS entry in the long-running Golf series, and it is arguably not just the best game in the series, but one of the best Golf games ever made, period. The visuals and graphics are fantastic, polished and colorful. There’s plenty of courses to play on and different game modes to play through. And the core gameplay is in my opinion the best this series has ever had. This is an absolute must-have for Golf fans who own a Nintendo 3DS.

Grade: A

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