Review: Mario Strikers: Battle League

I was so looking forward to this...but it's so disappointing.

This trend of releasing bare minimum games and patching updates in later (free or not) is awful.

Beautiful animations, but there's so much to be frustrated with.

This sounds really fun, but I was put off previous Mario Strikers because of a lack of content... to hear it's the same here sadly makes me want to give it a miss completely. Switch Sports has been rather disappointing, as well, because it feels so barebones compared to Wii Sports Resort.

Totally agree with you, Az - I get why it's being done, to squeeze out sales longer, but give us a meaty game and THEN keep supporting it with more, not a skeleton to start with!

I'd honestly be interested to know how this does work long-term for the games they've been doing this with.

Surely, by the time the game is complete with all the content they want to add in, most people will have moved on from the game. Many people have put off buying Strikers, for example, because of the minimal launch content, and you'd have to wonder how many of them would still buy it even after the add-on content is released. People forget, buy other games, move on etc.

You can see some games having long legs, like Mario Kart, but I feel games like Strikers and Golf are more limited in their appeal. If Strikers doesn't do too well, I think only Nintendo is to blame. It is less popular than Kart, obviously, but I just have a feeling it's not gonna do as great as it could have done if they hadn't made such an unappealing, barebones package. And it's real sad, because I was one of those really waiting for a new Strikers. I got it because I had to use one of my vouchers up, but I wouldn't have gone near it based on its current state otherwise.

Tennis Aces, Golf and now this have all been disappointing on launch, like Az said I just don't get the approach. Unfortunately both Tennis and Golf have probably sold well enough for them to keep warranting this approach. I am more annoyed that the "full" game isn't on the cart if they keep doing this way of drip feeding out content.

The thing is what Aces turned out to be was good, but it still, to this day, lacks basic options that were available in previous Mario Tennis games. 

The demo for Mario Strikers actually tempered my excitement for this game, but that was just the demo I guess. On the flip side loads of people seem to be enjoying this but probably because they have not played the predecessors so they know how much better it could be.