Super Mario Bros. 35

Genre: Platformer

Players: 35 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

Super Mario Bros. 35 is a free-to-play Platformer available to anyone with a Nintendo Switch Online account, although it is only available from October 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021, so if you want to give it a try, you’d better try it soon, because the clock is ticking. This is a game that takes a formula similar to Tetris 99 and applies it to the original Super Mario Bros., pitting your play through Super Mario Bros. against 34 other players doing the same.

In terms of presentation, this is pretty bare bones, featuring the same 8-bit visuals and sound of the original Super Mario Bros., alongside simple menus and an interface that’s very similar to what we saw in Tetris 99. I will say that unlike Tetris 99, Super Mario Bros. 35 does clearly show you what each Mario is doing in real-time at the standard framerate, which is nice.

For those wondering exactly how this works, players play through the game gathering two resources, time and coins. Time gets added to your clock whenever you defeat an enemy or grab a fire flower when you’re fully powered-up, while you get coins the usual way as well as when you nab a 1UP. Defeating enemies does more than net you time, however – it sends the enemies to one of your opponents, with players able to use the right stick to choose one of four categories of players to send them to (those attacking you, those with the most coins, those short on time, or random). Coins, meanwhile, can be used to buy random power-ups while you’re playing, at the cost of 20 coins per power-up. Completing a stage may send you to the next stage, or some other random stage, and warp zones will give you a choice of a few stages seemingly selected at random. With those being the rules, you are tasked with living as long as possible, with the final goal being to outlast all 34 other players.

It bears mention that the gameplay here is very clearly not an emulated version of the original Super Mario Bros. Characters move and interact more in line with the Super Mario Maker games, with enemies bouncing off of springboards, and Mario easily able to stomp on an enemy to gain height like he can in Super Mario Bros. 3 and onward. Purists may see this as a flaw in this game’s design, but I don’t feel strongly about it either way, really.

Readers here may recall that in my review of Tetris 99, I felt that game was overrated, and one of its biggest flaws was that its matchmaking was so poor that it seemed to always stick you with some expert player you had no hope of beating. In this game I feel like it has kinda’ the opposite problem. I felt it was exceedingly easy to place first – you don’t need to speed through levels, you just need to not die, so focus your energy on moving through levels carefully, and to a lesser extent killing every enemy you can easily dispatch with fire Mario because there’s no risk and it adds time to the clock, and make liberal use of items whenever you take damage, because there’s no need to save the coins – you’re not being rated on how far you get or how many coins you have, only on how long you survive.

I got first place in roughly half of the games I played doing this, and for the record I am pretty good at Platformers, but not “Kaizo Mario”-level good. Maybe the other players just haven’t gotten the hang of this version of the game yet, I dunno, but I feel like anyone who approaches this game sensibly and has a reasonable recollection of Super Mario Bros. (the first two levels specifically, as they’re what you’ll be seeing the most) and a passable skill at playing Platformers will find it a breeze to play this game.

There’s a few other problems here too. The game doesn’t explain how it determines what level it places you in after you complete another level, and the seeming randomness of it is annoying. This is especially true when the standard game mode lets you select a level at the beginning, apparently only to ignore it when you start (perhaps it randomly chooses one level from everyone’s picks and everyone plays that same level to start with? But then why do later levels randomly shift you around?). Conversely, there’s a challenge variant that just starts you in whatever level the game feels like, with 100 coins to start with.

Beyond this, you can collect images for your avatar (just various sprites from the original Super Mario Bros.), and you can see your ranking for each game mode, but that’s about all there is here, and it’s honestly kinda’ a shame. “Mario Battle Royale” sounds like an amazing idea, and despite that some effort clearly went into ensuring that this game was released as a polished product, it still feels pretty bare-bones, even for a free-to-play game.

In the end, if you have Nintendo Switch Online, you might as well give Super Mario Bros. 35 a try while it lasts, since Nintendo is yanking it away in March for some reason. It is amusing at least on a conceptual level. However, in terms of being a satisfying competition, this is a game that’s too easy to dominate just by being a bit cautious, and the game is so lacking in content that I can’t see it holding your attention for very long, even if it’s fun for a short while.

tl;dr – Super Mario Bros. 35 takes the original Super Mario Bros. and gives it a Tetris 99-style “battle royale” treatment by having players compete against 34 other players at once. It’s a fun concept, but it’s lacking in features and once you understand how the game works, it’s fairly easy to succeed by playing defensively. You might as well go ahead and play it before Nintendo yanks it away again at the end of March 2021, but expect this to be a mildly amusing distraction that you play for a little while before tiring of it and moving on to something with more substance.

Grade: C+

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