Super Mario Party

Genre: Party Game / Minigame Collection

Players: 1-4 Competitive / Team Competitive / Cooperative (Local / Online)

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Review:

Super Mario Party is the eleventh console installment of Nintendo’s long-running family-friendly Party Game / Minigame Collection series, with the main portion of the game set up like a board game. This game requires Joy-Cons to play (one per person), and makes use of both the motion-sensing features of that controller as well as integrating the HD rumble into the gameplay.

Before going on, I should mention that I don’t have much experience with the Mario Party series. I think the only one I played was the first Mario Party, many years ago. So if you’re looking for a comparison, well, that’s not what this is. This game review will be looking at the game based on its own merits.

In terms of the presentation, this game looks… about how you’d expect from a modern Mario spinoff title. It’s bright and colorful and polished, but for the most part not particularly impressive in any way, although there are occasional exceptions. Water effects in this game look gorgeous, and occasionally you’ll see something that looks really good, like one minigame involving meat frying in a frying pan. However, for the most part these are highlights in an otherwise solid but unspectacular presentation.

The sound, also, does what it needs to do but not much more. You have your standard snippets of Mario characters making little vocal sounds or saying their names along with cartoony sound effects and a cheerful soundtrack, but nothing especially memorable or interesting. Solid but unspectacular.

Players are given a healthy number of options when it comes to how they want this game’s 80 minigames delivered to them, although some seem to work better than others.

Firstly, there’s the game’s main Mario Party mode, the traditional board game-style mode where players roll a die and move around a game board. I have the same issue with this game mode as I did with the first Mario Party ages ago – it is very difficult to move around the board in any sort of deliberate, thoughtful way, and so many of the game’s elements are randomized that it feels like any semblance of skill gets chucked out the window in favor of pure luck. While I understand the appeal of a game that anyone of any age has a chance to win, I’ve always felt like a game loses all meaning if you don’t feel like your input into that game doesn’t matter. What’s more, the minigames themselves don’t even provide much of an incentive to win – the coins you earn from these are not the primary factor in winning the game, and you don’t even get all that many of them for winning. Add to this the fact that there are only three different game boards to play on (with a fourth unlockable board), and while each of these has fun little features exclusive to that game board, the fact that there’s only just a few boards is a bit disappointing.

Partner Party is, I feel, a huge improvement over the traditional Mario Party experience. Here, players compete in teams of two on boards with similar theming to the Mario Party boards (which again means you only get just a few boards, unfortunately), but now you can move more freely on a grid, which combines with the team element to make this mode a lot more strategic. Players can split up to cover more ground, or stick together in hopes of both landing on a star space together and doubling their bonus. Especially compared with Mario Party mode, I felt like this game mode struck an excellent balance between random luck and skill.

In River Survival mode, players are all playing in co-op together, with the framing device of this mode being a raft that players must work together to steer to avoid obstacles and pop balloons containing the minigames. This mode is excellent in theory, but in practice, it’s limited by the fact that the game only contains 10 co-op minigames, and you’ll be running through those pretty quickly.

Sound Stage’s framing device doesn’t seem to affect the gameplay at all, it’s just an excuse to have players playing through specifically only the music-rhythm minigames contained within this game. Again, not a bad idea, except that there are only ten music-rhythm minigames here.

Minigames mode has three different sub-modes, Free Play, Mariothon, and Square Off – each of which I feel deserves a little attention of their own.

Free Play is exactly what you’d think it is – select the minigames you want to play one at a time, however you like. This is a great way to focus on trying out all the different minigames (though some need to be unlocked in other modes) or focus on only those minigames you like the most enjoy. To that end, the game even lets you mark a minigame as a favorite, and players can go to a favorites menu to pare the games down to only those they most enjoyed, complete with a “random choice” button to have the game randomly select one for you. If you’re just looking to keep playing minigames for a long while without any of the superflous stuff on top of it, this mode is nearly perfect, and the only thing I think I’d change is to give the ability to make multiple “playlists”.

Mariothon is a quick and easy mode where the game randomly selects five minigames, and players compete to have the best running total among all of them. However, just as with River Survival and Sound Stage, this mode is limited by its use of only a small handful of minigames, which is a shame because otherwise this could have been a nice middle ground between the board game-y modes and the Free Play mode.

Square Off mode takes the minigames and has players winning them to claim squares on an Othello-like board, complete with the ability to flip other players’ squares if they surround them. This one’s pretty solid, though I do feel that if a player is somewhat better than the others at the minigames and has even a decent grasp of how this sort of game plays, it’s very easy to dominate.

Okay, I’m about halfway through talking about the game modes here… you still with me? Good? Yeah, this game offers a lot of options of game modes. Okay, moving on!

After Minigames mode you have the Online Mariothon mode, which combines Mariothon’s lack of variety with some of the worst online play I have ever experienced in a Nintendo Switch game. Seriously, Super Mario Party came out two years ago, and that the online play in a Nintendo game is still this bad after having two years to patch it is an outright disgrace. We’re talking constant freezing and slowdown presumably caused by latency issues, and then subsequently players dropping out either because the game messed up or simply because they got fed up with this terrible, terrible mode. This is the only online mode in the game, and with this being the case, I think I can safely say that you should not buy this game if you’re wanting to play primarily online.

After that horrible disgrace of a game mode, there’s Toad’s Rec Room, which is kinda’ its own thing – the four minigames contained here are separate from the rest of the game and exclusive to this mode. Specifically, these games are designed to be played with multiple Switches in handheld mode, although three of the four can be played just fine in docked mode. Mini League Baseball is a cute toy baseball game that’s surprisingly fun and simple to play. Shell Shocked Deluxe is a two-player top-down tank minigame that’s fun but a bit shallow. Puzzle Hustle is a co-op game where players rearrange tiles to form different Mario character sprites, which is okay, but it’s a game you’ll likely play once and never go back to. Finally, Banana Split requires two Switches and has you lining them up with each other to compare pictures, and I’ll say that I wasn’t able to test this mode, but judging from the description it seemed gimmicky and not very compelling. All told, I feel like Toad’s Rec Room is a nice bonus smattering of games, but clearly just that – a nice extra.

Challenge Road is a series of 80 individual challenges – one for each minigame. This seems to be intended to give players something to do in single-player mode, though I can’t say it adds too much to the game.

Finally, there’s the Stickers mode, which lets you use stickers to create scenes against various backdrops. Um… so basically, just something for very young kids.

All of these modes are arranged in a plaza players can walk around, though they can also be accessed via a menu. And while most of this game is centered around multiplayer play, any unfilled slots will be filled by bots with three difficulty levels. I found the Easy and Normal bots to be pathetically incompetent (especially frustrating in team challenges), but Hard bots were a fair challenge.

Okay, now after all of that, it’s time to address the other element of the game, the minigames themselves. And the minigames here are… actually really, really good. Oh, there are a few stinkers, to be sure, but for the most part, the minigames here are wonderfully varied, inventive, and tons of fun. The minigames that use motion control all use it in ways that really enhance the gameplay (although the music-rhythm ones have odd timing that takes getting used to), and some minigames even find some really creative use for the HD rumble feature. Plus, the fact that minigames let players have a moment to practice with their controls before the actual competition starts is welcome, and helps to avoid the problem these sorts of collections often have of “by the time I understood how this minigame worked, I had already lost”.

Okay, so after allllllll of that, what do I think of Super Mario Party? Well, the game modes vary wildly in quality and most of them are lacking content in some form or another, the online play is garbage and single-player is unsatisfying… and yet despite this, the core gameplay here is fantastic with tons of variety, lost of clever use of the Joy-Cons’ unique features, and so long as you stick to the better gameplay modes, you should have a great time in a party setting… which is exactly what this game sets out to do. Don’t get me wrong, there is tons of room for improvement here, but if you’re looking for a great party game for the Nintendo Switch, Super Mario Party will definitely leave you satisfied.

tl;dr – Super Mario Party is the eleventh game in Nintendo’s family-friendly Party Game Minigame Collection series. This game has a ton of different game modes, and while some aren’t so great, others are fantastic. The minigames themselves are fun, varied, and make some clever use of the Joy-Con controller. On that note, you will need Joy-Cons to play this game, and don’t bother with the online play (it’s horrible). Likewise, this isn’t a game you’ll want to play in single-player. However, if you’re looking for a fun time in a party setting, this game does a fantastic job and is a must-have for casual multiplayer fans on the switch.

Grade: B+

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