Playing 'Super Mario Party' alone makes me feel sad
Super Mario Party is an OK game. The concept is fine. The minigames are decent. The whole thing is so mediocre.
Super Mario Party, the 11th Mario Party game for home consoles and the first on Nintendo Switch, takes the 20-year-old series and does almost nothing new with it. When playing it with a friend, it was fine. When playing it by myself, it was aggressively boring.
Like all of its predecessors, Super Mario Party is basically a digital board game starring characters from the Super Mario universe, where players roll dice to move around a board and collect coins to find and buy randomly located stars -- the player with the most stars wins.
At the end of each turn, players compete in a random minigame (of which there are 80) to earn more coins. These minigames are definitely the most exciting part of the game, but they aren't particularly exciting.
While the Switch presents some potentially interesting minigame mechanics with its HD rumble and motion controls, Super Mario Party feels like it could be a Wii game with its basic minigames that barely utilize what the Switch has to offer.
Some of the minigames are fun, sure, but many of them are slow and amount to nothing more than pressing a single button repeatedly.
Super Mario Party also forces players to use a single Joy-Con controller, which is not a particularly comfortable way to play any game, except for maybe 1-2-Switch, which honestly is quite a bit more fun to play than Super Mario Party.
But Super Mario Party isn't all about the minigames. The delivery system for them, the board game part, is cool for a couple turns. Players need to be lucky with their dice rolls and placement to win, and that's roughly it. It pretty much all comes down to luck.
The maps are attractive and they have some unique mechanics that shake things up, but they tend to be more frustrating than anything. The unique mechanics are mostly unavoidable events that either force characters to move spaces or lose coins.
The only thing that made Super Mario Party enjoyable was playing with someone I like. But even then, neither of us wanted to play a second round.
Playing by myself felt like a chore, because almost no part of it is engrossing enough to stand on its own. The reliance on luck for success was annoying and made me lose interest, because trying didn't really matter.
Super Mario Party is, if anything, a disappointment.
Topics Gaming Nintendo Nintendo Switch
