‘Mario Party Superstars’ Review: Accessible Competition Outshines Minimal Content for a Zany Good Time

In a world where the Nintendo Switch offers arguably the top titles in both comfort gaming with Animal Crossing: New Horizons and colorful competition in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, they are now trying to give us the best of both with Mario Party Superstars. With a delightfully vibrant presentation, zany spirit, and light-hearted, anything-can-happen competition, Superstars is able to mostly outshine its threadbare content as a warm welcome home for fans of the series, a great introduction for newcomers, and an all-around simple escape into some roof-raising family entertainment.

Neither the next original entry in the series or a complete remake in the traditional sense of the world, Superstars is a big celebration of the series that dates back to 1998 and across ten main console games. Perhaps trying to entice the gamers like myself who remember packing the cartridges of the first three games into their Nintendo 64, the game features an admittedly limited five remastered boards from across the system’s Mario Party, Mario Party 2, and Mario Party 3. As for the representation of the other games, included are 100 minigames from across the series. If not experienced during the end-of-round minigame session on the main boards, these can all be accessed on Mt. Minigames, a place where you can go with friends or alone to train up to take on would-be challengers on the board.

RELATED: ‘Mario Party Superstars’ Will Divide Family and Friends Alike This Fall

If you’re like me, the main boards are where you’re most likely to spend the bulk of your time, and as long as you’re playing with friends and family around the house or online, it’s a brilliant, madcap time. The fresh coat of paint on classic maps like Mario Party 2’s Horror Land or Mario Party’s Peach’s Birthday Cake is a tonic for my tired adult eyes and enraptured the faces of my young niece and nephew (who, while being too young to play, still stared and laughed at the colorful energy). On top of whimsical designs that make it fun to discover all the twists and turns of the board, each map features unique events that can shift up the board either in your favor or to your disadvantage. In my time across all the boards, I found some of these events either highly enjoyable, like a big fish moving the star from one side of the board to the opposite side on Yoshi’s Island, or just downright unnoticeable if you don’t interact with a very specific part of the map, like the shifting of night and day on Horror Land.

Retaining its simple board-game style approach, in which you roll the dice and move to the spaces, some quality of life measures have been taken to speed up the pace of the game without diminishing the fun and need for strategy. With each player having access to a map and a counter that shows how many steps you are away from a star, it’s easy to stay on track towards the shiny prize, while plenty of “Lucky Spaces,” “Item Events,” and “Event Spaces” make it so every player is bound to earn some sort of prize or helpful item across the playtime. This, along with the always-funny reactions of one player shoving past another on the game board, makes staying hooked on the screen all too easy. It’s been such a joy to revisit the pure spirit of the games, even if the new look of the maps doesn’t retain the stories that used to accompany them. While past games made the goal of beating Bowser via some sort of themed event for the winner (which is then hinted at here when you play a map for the first time as a “Once upon a time” angle), when a winner is chosen here, that’s the end. While not detrimental to the main experience, it did leave out a grander sense of triumph.

With such a focus on streamlining the experience and trying so hard to make what’s old look new again, Superstars doesn’t offer enough flat-out new to really bring Mario Party into the future. Along with the aforementioned five maps to choose from, you only get about ten characters to choose from to put on the board — and all of them have been featured in past games. With games like Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. offering tons of characters to choose from in Nintendo’s history, it’s weird that Nintendo settled on such a select few characters here, and with no discernible difference to how they play in any way. That’s probably because the name of the game here is familiarity, and as someone who really is okay with that for the most part, a few new characters to choose from and perhaps some cosmetic changes to, say, the dice they use would have been a welcome update.

That same focus on simple playtime was extended to Mt. Minigames, which is the only activity left to do after the main boards. For the most part, the new area is exactly what you would expect. It’s a place to go where you and friends can play minigames to your heart’s content, either picking any of the 100 games or jumping into specific 1 vs. 3 or 2 vs. 2 matches. Considering how brief the games are I didn’t find myself sticking around there too long — but where there is potential for some longevity is in the Survival mode. In as close as Mario Party will ever get to Dark Souls, this mode allows a single player to jump into minigames with players online, with victory advancing them to the next game and the next round of players, and one loss sending you back to the start. I found it to be a great way to train up on the minigames against other skilled players, and really the only reason worth sticking around Mt. Minigames for very long — at least when playing at home alone.

In trying to offer some kind of incentive to keep playing outside of the general fun of it (which may not be enough for many modern gamers), Superstars offers coins and points after each round of minigames or main board action. These go toward increasing your “Level” and giving you coins to buy collectibles, like reaction stickers I’ve found genuinely enjoyable to use during board games with online players, and encyclopedia pages that offer very brief education on the characters and past games. However, this is about it in the way of collectibles, and as someone who doesn’t really care about collecting what essentially adds up to a bunch of factoids, it feels like Nintendo just throwing something, anything out there to make players feel like there’s a reason to play the game beyond for the simple pleasure of owning your friends.

As a young gamer, I spent hours and hours playing through all the maps of the early Mario Party games, and in my late 20s, I have had a blast revisiting them with friends and family. This is a game at its best when you’re playing alongside the people in your life, and the fact Nintendo has put in the effort to keep that kind of gaming spirit alive for new players makes Mario Party Superstars an easy recommendation. Even if you’re playing at home alone with the handheld in bed, the online features make pairing up with players around the world easy for some friendly, low-stakes competition. While I would’ve traded most of Mt. Minigames and the so-so collectibles for more maps and characters, and maybe even some story attached to the maps, Superstars is a great balance of easy-going gaming and zany competition that makes playtime with loved ones the kind of party it deserves to be.

Grade: B+

Mario Party Superstars is now available on Nintendo Switch.

KEEP READING: 10 Most Iconic Video Game Themes

Read Next

About The Author