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It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to!

Tom Middler rounds up a few mates to don their party hats and get ready for a game of Super Mario Party, but is the portly plumber’s newest multiplayer focused Nintendo Switch game actually any good?

By Tom Middler

Although it’s been over one hundred years since “Mensch ärgere dich nicht” started causing family and friends to feud over a game, in the mere 18 years since I scraped my pocket money together to buy the latest N64 release, the ‘Mario Party’ franchise has achieved a similar feat.

That N64 original basically invented the concept of “videogame/boardgame”, and although countless other titles have copied it since (this itself is the 16th official Mario Party game all in all), it’s good to know that the core concept of virtual board games laced with competitive multiplayer face-offs still holds up well in 2018.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the need for willing participants to join the party. Much like any real life shindig, it’s not a great deal of fun to pull on a paper hat and start the party by yourself. Where Super Mario Party really comes to life is, of course, with you and three human buddies (try this thing called Facebook if you’re running low, I’ve heard that works). Online multiplayer is featured, but whilst available, it’s limited to just a handful of mini-games, so local play is definitely where it’s at!

Bilder aus "Super Mario Party"

Nintendo

Once you bring a gathering together, there are a handful of boards to roll your way around on the all-important hunt for coins and stars, and 84 mini-games of various wacky and wonderful types, designed for maximum competitiveness in around 30 seconds each. The fun comes from the basic “knock your mate off a ledge”, “steal coins from your mate” or “team-up on your mate” gameplay (sorry, mate), although there are some neat team games thrown in there too, meaning you can forge alliances with rivals and work together.

Once you roll your choice of die (it’s not just the standard 1-6 on offer here), the game boards to explore in the quest for stars are as varied and colourful as you’d expect, and the arbitrary dishing out of stars at the end of a game can make your language equally colourful, although to be honest the post-game star awarding process isn’t quite as random and game changing as it once was. If you play a good game, you might actually get the win you deserve this time.

Bilder aus "Super Mario Party"

Nintendo

What’s also new for this Switch iteration is that there are much better ways to use the available content, with the regular dice-rolling board game mode, a co-op mode, a river rafting mini-game challenge mode, a weirdly catchy rhythm game mode, and other little extras thrown in liberally (my personal favourite being a delightful 4-player table-top Baseball game, with all the whirrs and clicks that you’d want from an actual physical game).

That all adds up to a much better package than any of the recent Mario Party instalments, and with so much focus placed on the features of the Switch’s neat little joy-cons, the mix and match mini-game format is also a great way to introduce the system to friends and family over the coming holiday season. Despite the limited amount of online content, this is a massive return to form for the Mario Party series, and so I have no hesitation in saying “get your hands on a copy of Super Mario Party, get your mates round, and get ready to have some fun!”

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