Mario Golf: Super Rush

Genre: Sports (Golf)

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Alternating), 2 Competitive (Local Splitscreen), 2-4 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

(Note: This is an outdated review. You can find the updated review here.)

Mario Golf: Super Rush is the requisite Nintendo Switch entry in Nintendo’s long-running series that has Mario, Luigi, and the rest of his cartoony friends (and rivals, and enemies) playing Golf in conditions ranging from almost realistic to ridiculous. Released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, Mario Golf: Super Rush is the fifth game in the series to bear the Mario Golf title, though some consider games like NES Open Tournament Golf to be part of the series as well. In any case, this entry brings to the series a new Speed Golf mode, a hectic Battle Mode, and the long-awaited return of an Adventure Mode with RPG elements.

Initial impressions of Mario Golf: Super Rush’s presentation are fantastic – this game absolutely has the sort of polish and style you expect from a Mario spin-off, with nice character models, detailed textures, good lighting, and just an overall bright and colorful style that’s very appealing. However, looking a bit closer, you definitely see some cracks. The nice detail you see up-close turns to ugliness when you look farther away, and there’s plenty of pop-in to be found. Also, there’s some nasty aliasing going on here too. And on top of that, while the look of this game overall has a lot of personality, the courses themselves seem prone to a lot of “sameyness” that leads to them seeming dull and repetitive once you’ve gotten a feel for their individual style.

The sound here is likewise a mixed bag. The sounds of the club hitting the ball and ball hitting the green are fine, but the repetitive noises of the Mario characters seem to lack the nuance they have in other games. I will say quite a few of the music tracks here are great and really enhance the feel of the areas they inhabit (Bonny Greens Town, Wildweather Woods (Speed Golf), Ridgerock Lake, and Bowser Highlands (Speed Golf) are all excellent, I feel), but there are also a lot of filler tracks here that feel like “generic sports music”.

I’d say that overall here the presentation is still very good, but it does feel like in every area of that presentation there are weak points that could have been a bit better.

When it comes to the gameplay, let’s start with the basics – how does Mario Golf: Super Rush handle simple golf gameplay? Well, the answer there is that for the most part, the core gameplay here is good, though it doesn’t do anything truly revolutionary. In the few areas it does do things a bit out of the norm, they seem harmless but largely ineffectual changes to the standard Golf formula we’ve seen used in games for ages.

Like most games in the genre, you’ll still be filling a bar and timing a button press to determine your power and to some extent shot accuracy. This is augmented somewhat by the ability to separately add spin in multiple stages after setting up your swing, potentially allowing the shot to zig-zag between obstacles if need be. This is a clever touch, but I can’t help but feel like it’ll rarely be necessary and as a result it won’t be a skill well-practiced enough to be reliable. On the other hand, the shot gives you a good indication at what point your shot power risks accuracy, giving a visual representation to the margin of error higher up on the shot bar. While this is appreciated, what isn’t appreciated is how little indication the game seems to give you about other important factors, like wind (are there leaves blowing to the left? Then I guess the wind is going that way… ish…), or the way the terrain is laid out in the spot your shot will land – as far as I can tell, you can press a button to eyeball any spot within line-of-sight of your ball to get an analysis of that spot, but if you’re not within line-of-sight all you’ll have to go on is the bird’s-eye view, which doesn’t indicate elevation beyond a rough estimation of the area.

As long as I’m talking about the interface and controls, I might as well mention the game’s motion-sensitive controls, and I feel like all I need to say regarding this is… don’t. Wii Sports Golf this ain’t, and the motion controls here are both unintuitive and make for some absolutely absurd shots. Unless you like losing spectacularly, stick to the more traditional gamepad controls.

In the end, the core gameplay is mostly good here, though not without some seriously rough spots. But then of course the question becomes, what about all of those new game modes, and how good is the content here? Once again, my answer is somewhat mixed.

Firstly, I imagine many are going to be disappointed by Adventure Mode. I’m sure many of you were hoping for something akin to Golf Story’s somewhat open-ended Golf RPG progression, and this simply is not that. Rather, the Adventure mode in this game is a fairly linear affair, and while players can indeed progress through this mode to level up the various stats of a Mii golfer, it feels less like an adventure and more like a series of exercises with a weak attempt at a nominal story.

As disappointing as this is, players will likely feel compelled to work their way through this mode anyway, as this is the only way to unlock the game’s half-dozen courses. Let me unpack that sentence, because there’s a lot of disappointment right there. Yes, there are only a half a dozen different courses, and yes, you need to play through the campaign to unlock them in all other modes. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, as I alluded to before, many of the courses feel so lacking in personality that multiple holes on the same course can feel identical.

There are so many places I can point to in that last paragraph that just feel wrong. Needing to unlock courses in the campaign to play them in multiplayer? Homogenized samey courses in a Mario spin-off? And then of course there’s also the fact that this low number of courses puts in at just over one-third of the number of courses in the prior game in the series, Mario Golf: World Tour on the 3DS. Now, to be fair, Nintendo did say that more free content for the game is en route, including at least one new course based on New Donk City from Super Mario Odyssey, but this content is not here now, and even when it releases I suspect it won’t do much to change how underwhelming the content here is.

And lest I forget to detail them, the other new elements here are Speed Golf and Battle Golf.

Speed Golf seems like an interesting idea, having players trying to line up shots and run to them in a time limit, but I’m just not sold on this mode, and I think it’s largely because its determination of how to award points makes it difficult to tell just how much you’re risking when you take an extra moment to line up your shot. Is the time more important, or is it more important to make use of the potential to take another stroke off of the hole? There’s clearly some importance to both here, but in the moment it’s difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

Out of all of this game’s different modes and experiments, the one that I ultimately felt had the most potential was also the one I was initially the least interested in – Battle Golf. This mode starts with the formula of Speed Golf, but isn’t interested in number of strokes or time. Rather, players are trying to be the first to claim a set number of holes on an enclosed course, all competing at the same time. It’s silly, hectic, and just plain dumb fun… but only for two players locally. I swear, it’s like every time this game shows a bit of promise, it does something to dull that promise. Here was a game mode that at the very least had the potential to make for a great party game… except you can’t really play it in a party setting. I mean, come on, Nintendo, what are you doing?

Well, I guess that brings me to the multiplayer. In short, if it involves multiple players doing things on the same screen at once, it only supports two players, but if you can alternate play or play online, you can play with up to four. And… you know, that’s fine, but if Nintendo was really going to push game modes in Super Rush that involve real-time action, they should have made sure to implement them in a way that could support the multiplayer play that gamers would have undoubtedly expected this game to support. Oh, and that’s not even mentioning how spotty the online play here is. I had trouble even getting into a game at first, and once I did, there were definitely moments of lag that were a bit jarring.

In conclusion, I hate to fall prey to an easy joke and a meme, but I have to address it – I see some people calling this game Mario Golf: Super Rushed, and I can’t help but feel like there’s a ring of truth to that. There’s no question that this game has some good ideas, and many facets of this game have that signature Nintendo quality that’s unparalleled in the industry. But in just about every area of this game, it features rough spots, elements that are broken or poorly-conceived, places where it could have used more work, and outright dumb decisions that hurt the game overall. Nintendo themselves even seem to realize how content-poor this game is by confirming prior to launch that more content is on the way.

If you’re a fan of Golf videogames, will you like Mario Golf: Super Rush? Probably, yeah. Like I said, it’s a good Golf game, despite its flaws. Is this a great entry in the series? Absolutely not. Will the average non-golf-loving Mario fan enjoy it? Ehh, maybe, maybe not. Overall, at its core this is still a superb game of Golf, but the game wrapped around that core is such a muddled mix of good, bad, and inexplicable that it’s hard not to see this as a disappointment, despite that it’s still pretty good.

tl;dr – Mario Golf: Super Rush is a cartoony game of Golf starring Mario and friends, with this entry in the series adding a new Adventure mode, a Speed Golf mode, and a Battle Golf mode. While the core golf gameplay here is good, many of the other elements of this game are poorly thought-out, flawed, or severely lacking content. The result is a game that’s very good… and also a huge disappointment.

Grade: B-

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