Mario Sports Superstars (Nintendo 3DS) Second Opinion Review

Mario Sports Superstars consists of five sports, four of which have been visited by Mario and co. previously: golf, tennis, baseball and football (soccer) all return here, while horse racing makes its Mushroom Kingdom debut, too. It's also worth noting that Camelot has assisted Bandai Namco in the game's development - their pedigree with the Mario Tennis and Mario Golf series has proved them more than worthy of carrying the baton onto this entry.

Sadly, this scant compilation doesn't nearly match up to Camelot's past efforts in terms of content. Previous tennis and golf games were bursting with content, with some even containing entire single-player RPG-style stories as an aside, while here the two modes are as barebones as the Wii U's particularly disappointing Mario Tennis: World Tour. The stylish power shots of Mario Tennis: Power Tour on GameCube (and later Wii) are toned down significantly, and the choice of courts and courses feels much more lacking. It's not hard to breeze through everything these modes have to offer in a couple of hours at most, and will leave most players hungry for more.

It's a theme that carries over to baseball and football, too. The charm that one might expect from a sports game set in the Mushroom Kingdom, complete with its extreme landscapes and varied power-ups, is nigh on non-existent here, with realistic physics and courses being the centre of attention. While the ability to select teams from a variety of series familiar side characters and enemies is welcome and does add a touch of charm, it often feels like this could be a spin-off of any franchise - Mario Super Sluggers and Mario Strikers Charged Football this certainly isn't.

The one small exception to this is the final mode: horse racing. While still far from perfect, the ability to train a horse and level its stats up, as well as customising it from an (admittedly rather lacking) range of accessories, is a lovely touch, and including an explorable environment outside of gameplay to find power-ups and new accessories adds much more depth to the mode, even if it is a little smaller than most would like. The racing itself is great fun, acting almost like a slower-paced Mario Kart - the added mechanic of conserving stamina á la The Legend of Zelda's horse riding gameplay brings an extra layer of strategy and makes it the most involved, gripping section of the game. Expect to spend the majority of Mario Sports Superstars' relatively small amount of playtime hours in this mode.

For those that finish everything that the single-player has to offer (and it certainly won't take long), there's also a range of multiplayer options, including online play. Playing with strangers across the world is (as has often been the case with first-party Nintendo games) rough around the edges, with long waiting times and a tendency for losing players to tap out early, but friends who both happen to own copies of the game will likely have a lot of fun playing against each other. Download Play would have been a particularly welcome addition, especially following its turn in Mario Party: Star Rush, but it's sadly missing, meaning friends without their own cartridge are out of luck.

Sports Superstars is also notable for bringing even more Mario amiibo to the table, this time in the form of amiibo cards. The retail version of the game comes with one randomly selected card, while they're also available in packets of five in stores. There are ninety in all, with each of the eighteen characters receiving one for each sport, but sadly they're only compatible with Mario Sports Superstars - there's no using a Luigi card to scan him into Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, for instance, limiting their functionality greatly for anyone who isn't a completionist. Their function in the game itself is also limited, offering more powerful versions of each character to be unlocked immediately (rather than completing tedious training tasks in each mode instead), which can then be levelled up. Scanning three of them also unlocks the "Road to Superstar" minigame, a Breakout clone that bestows even more power to each character that clears it. Needless to say, this doesn't hold the player's attention for too long either.

The main flaw of Mario's latest sporting effort is that it's simply not fun. From the locales that are completely lacking in care and personality, to the crowds in each sport that are made up of poorly-animated sprites (an unforgivably lazy design choice in 2017), Sports Superstars feels void of the life that made us fall in love with Mario Golf on Nintendo 64, or be wowed by the spectacle of Wii's Mario Strikers Charged Football, and for that it's very difficult to recommend.