Nintendo has a knack for producing good sports games. Mario Tennis, Mario Kart, Mario Golf… The franchise revisits soccer for the first time since the days of the Wii with Mario Strikers: Battle Leagueits most competitive multiplayer game in a long time.
Five against five, we play ball on a green field surrounded by an electric fence. Here, no yellow card: in the kingdom of mushrooms, soccer becomes an extreme contact sport. Mario, Peach, Bowser and Luigi tackle to take the ball, eat mushrooms to run faster or throw turtle shells to shove their opponents aside.
If the distribution of particular objects adds a part of chance to the thing, we are all the same far from the equalizing logic of Mario Kart. We are much closer to a competitive game like a title in the Smash series or Splatoon.
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Ranked mode for four players could have been promising, if only Nintendo could one day implement the bare minimum for online play: the ability to create a voice chat room with your friends directly on your console.
As of this writing, Nintendo Switch Online, the dastardly mobile app that lets you chat with teammates in connected games, still isn’t compatible with Strikers. Shameful, but not surprising.
In offline mode, large double elimination tournaments allow us to win gold coins to buy special equipment for our characters.
There where Strikers shines, it’s several in front of a large television. The characters of the series mario are superbly animated, doing little victory dances after each goal scored. The game is really fun, as long as you want to win and don’t lose too badly.
We may therefore prefer to have one-on-one duels, with each player controlling his team. But it is also possible to connect up to eight controllers to the console, allowing two teams to each control their characters. The goalkeepers are controlled at all times by the computer.
Nintendo knows the secret to designing memorable experiences in our living rooms. Too bad the Japanese firm is unable to repeat the feat remotely.