Super Mario Party - Nintendo Switch

Mario Party has been a 'staple' in our gaming lives since the first one came out. As a tradition for my son,(now 22 and living 4 states away). and I on holidays...primarily New Years when we've had junk food parties and marathon MP games. Our name for these parties is cr$pfest it's always been great fun that we've looked forward to and enjoyed as he's grown up. We've never thought any Mario Party release was 'bad' however a couple didn't quite live up to the expectations. Waiting years for a 'meh' did happen. That, however, wouldn't ever stop us from getting the latest release and boy are we both HAPPY we got this. My son has a Switch at his house since last Christmas and I recently got one just in anticipation this game. I pre-ordered the games for both of us and we had our deliveries from Best Buy right on time as always. We both left adulting to the emotional grown ups, left our respective offices a bit early on delivery/release day and dove right in. Game play...? Outstanding. Graphics are updated and beautiful but stay true to the Mario Party theme. Courses are traditional in game play yet very much updated and exceed expectations. Surprises around every corner and in unexpected ways make for fun challenges even if you are playing on the same board over and over. Gaining an ally? Who is a 'mortal enemy'? YES! Pass them on the board and what do you know...? Bowser...that nasty beast who has made life miserable for years is NOW helping you get stars! You can play solo yet choose your partner as if you were playing with a familiar friend. You can play as a single player in team mode and have the ability as a team to choose different paths to accomplish your team goal. Choose your own die blocks? You betcha! Mini games are completely new and well thought out. Some 'skills' like rowing are still there bringing a familiar feel to a very updated game however you should expect new challenges with the familiar. Good sportsmanship is a clear message sent throughout the game. High fives abound. Group cheers abundant. Sore losers who finished in 4th place no longer pout at their loss but cheer the winner. Not that this is a game changer since I mentioned my MP buddy is a career man now but for those reading this who have smaller people in house still...it's a very nice change. I will say I find the mini games more equalized for those who are still young and for those, like me, who are not so chronologically challenged. Firstly you don't have to choose practice mode or ready to play...it launches in practice mode and you choose when you are ready to play. No more accidental game starts before all are ready to give it a whirl. Many mini games give us old timers reason for pause and an understanding that perhaps our eyes didn't see what we thought they saw. Challenging. Fun. Too much to explore to get bored with this version. Now please excuse me. My son just texted he is making dinner and he'll let me know once he's done. We have a party to attend tonight. Yoshi and Daisy. Team Tomboy. We will be meeting up online. We have some mini games to crush together.

I've played all the Mario Partys and it seems every generation, it gets worse. I watched all the trailers and some of the short gameplays for this game and it looked really good. Needless to say, I was disappointed, and bored after a few rounds. Pros: -Partner System is an interesting edition, especially when they can participate in minigames. -Some neat random interactions -Good character selection. Cons: -Boards are too small this caused an average a star gained by someone every other round, and it wasn't rare that with your partners, you could traverse nearly the entire board in one round. -Only 4 small boards to choose from. -Boards are very bland, undecorated compared to previous Mario party boards, and mostly uneventful. -Some of the voices of the characters are butchered, what the heck did they do to boo and lakitu?! -Stars are only 10 coins each. -No competition. With stars given out like candy, there is little strategy involved. -Not many diverse minigames, 95% of them are 4 player, there is less than a handful of the others (1v3 and 2v2). -Most minigames seemed winnable with your eyes closed and a simple shake of the controller. -Items in the game are fairly generic. Also, "Item shops" if you want to even call it that, only have three items. -Points awarded from board and minigame play can be spent on...unlocking tutorials. Previous Mario Partys had unique items you could buy and put in a room to display. -Limited to using one joycon - I'm a big guy, my hands are huge, I need to be able to use other controllers as well. I found myself hitting multiple buttons at once on accident frequently. -Online is extremely limited and simply not even worth trying at this point. -Can't play in handheld mode The game feels incomplete and at best, a decent entry into a handheld Mario Party game, however, the Switch is also a console hybrid, so this feels out of place due to its lack of features. Even with future updates, this game needs some heavy revamping. This feels like the release of Bomberman R, which was a game released for the Switch that lacked a lot of basic features previous Bomberman games had--they're still trying to patch things up to bring it up to speed a year later! These lazy releases cannot continue to go unnoticed. Hold your coins for Mario Party 12, or at least, a couple months when they (hopefully) release more features and the price goes down.

4 out of 5 Stars Super Mario Party is a package of fun game modes designed for having fun with friends and family. Gaming today is a largely solitary experience. Super Mario Party is reminiscent of what made gaming so popular decades ago, experiencing games together. There is nothing like sitting down on the couch and learning the game, laughing together, and sometimes yelling at the competition while in the same room. Super Mario Party paired with the Nintendo Switch taps into those nostalgic experiences from arcades and early game consoles. The game uses the Switch’s hardware in interesting and creative ways. Being able to play with a single Joy-Con means you always have a 2 player set up on hand wherever your bring your Switch. The game features multiple game modes to change up the experience, allowing for competitive and cooperative gameplay. The mini games are fun and easy to learn. There are a few drawbacks to the game. While playing together in the same location is the ideal way to experience this game , in 2018, the lack of online options are certainly noticed. There are bare bones online options to playing individual mini games online with strangers, but nothing beyond that. Not being able to play a full round of Mario Party with friends online is a disappointment. While you can play against computer controlled characters, the lack of online essentially makes the game not worth playing unless you have a room full of people to join you. Nintendo is always behind in the online space, and this game is no exception. Additionally, the lack of Pro Controller support is frustrating. You must have an additional set of Joy-Con if you plan on playing with more than 2 people. Overall, I’d recommend purchasing this game if you regularly have people around to game with. It can be an absolute blast with the right group of people.

Mario Party is a game that relies heavily on two parts coming together to be better then they would be individually . You have the board game part, where characters roll to get around the board collecting coins, items, and stars along the way. And there's the minigame part, which mostly takes place after everyone has a roll on the board. In a minigame, players compete against each other or in teams to win coins they can use on the board. Care needs to be taken that both the board game and minigame aspects are worth playing, or the whole game becomes a boring slog. So what about Super Mario Party? I found it to be a compelling entry in the franchise. The minigames, even the ones using motion control, are fun, and the board game aspect returns to everyone moving individually so players can make their own choices about where to seek victory. A new part to the board game is that everyone has a generic 1-6 die and a special character specific die that may have multiples of one number or extremely low or high numbers. Some special die can make you gain or lose coins! These special die add to player decisions and the feeling that they had an effect on the game. There's even a few more modes for exploration. River survival forgoes the board, putting everyone in a raft which must be rowed to the end of a river under a time limit. Minigames appear in balloons and can add more time if players do well in them. There's a 2v2 mode that changes how players can move on the boards, forcing cooperation with a partner for victory. There's also a rhythm mode where players play exclusive minigames where they must move to the beat to win. There's also a singleplayer mode to unlock, challenging a player to win a minigame a certain way. Unfortunately I have a few grips. Turns could be streamlined better, as even a 10 turn game can last an hour. There can only be 10, 15, or 20 turn games. Online mode is limited to the minigame portion only and even then it only offers a few minigames to play. Some items appear too rarely. There's only four boards to play also. Overall Super Mario Party is a good game worthy of playing with friends on a couch, but feels like it could have been better if fleshed out just a bit more. Solo players should probably look elsewhere as the computer isn't as fun to compete with as real people and the online mode is severely lacking

I got my siblings to play this game with me so for the majority of the game we were able to play at least 3 to 4 players. this game's over all theme for its mini games revolve around much control. the game has 5 most traditional Mario Party, Co-op Mario Party, raft mode, mini game mode,and completion mode. caught mon consist of a board that you could walk wherever you want it's it's a grid system where you and your either empathy or friend hit a block, add those numbers together and then you could just walk wherever you want more than likely heading to the star if you have enough coins. objective of draft mode is to get to the end before the timer runs out and in order to get more time you complete mini games that are found on the river which start by hitting a balloon. each part of the river sections have different challenges that you have to face and each of the different ways will net you a jewel if you complete all the different sections. completion mode is just a basically all the many games and there's objective that you have to complete in order to go to the next one complete all of those and you'll get another Jewel. some of the things I don't like about the games that prevent me from giving it 5 stars is that each of the maps are small, they are very tiny. Another thing is that there's only 4 maps total, that's it, just 4 board game maps. none of us like how the narrator told us to high five each other Not only was it annoying but it took takes a lot of time away from the game when they keep telling you to do it after every game. Its especially noticeable in the raft game mode. Its a short game but Im guessing nintendo might add dlc later. I still dont understand why they dont add in some other characters from their other franchises. They should really give Mario party the kart or smash bros treatment. Overall we had fun with it and I would recommend this game. Sorry for any typos :)

I grew up with Mario Party 1-5 and was very disappointed with other releases such as Mario Party 10. It seems that this soft reboot of the franchise is what it needed. The original party action with minigames, board game movement and plenty of rage, are back. The minigames are really good this time around. I was a bit worried that they would all be gimmicky motion-based games but the majority don't require movement. I actually really enjoyed the motion and rumble games. The new Partner Party is one of my favorite modes. You and a teammate move freely across the board to get the most stars. The strategy is quite different here and is a great inclusion. There is also a coop/survival mode that is basically the standard mode from Mario Party 10. All of the players must work together to maneuver a raft down some rapids. Along the way you will run into minigame balloons that you will need to beat to increase the amount of time you have to finish the mode. These minigames are completely different from the ones you play in other modes. There is also game room where you can play any minigame and there are also games that can only be played here. For example, one game is a just "Combat" from the Atari 2600 but with Mario characters. The boards are pretty good this time around. However there are only 4 and Nintendo hasn't even hinted at any post-game content. Finally, like many of the recent games, Bowser and his minions are playable and the new primary baddie is Kamek from Yoshi's Island. While I prefer Bowser more, it doesn't take away from the overall game. It's just a little different for someone who mainly played Mario Party 2 on the N64.

Often times disappoint just sucks. Let me rephrase that, disappoint is always awful. That is how I felt about Mario Party 9 and Mario Party 10. They took what was a classic game and changed the style so much, that even the most die hard Mario fan such as myself was left never wanting to play. Thus came the Nintendo Switch and the first Mario Party offering on this new console. I'll be honest, given the previous games, skepticism was automatically a factor. Then I watched the trailers for the game and the way you could lay out the Switch Consoles on a table and play the game. I was intrigued and left as Kevin McCallister would say "thirsty for more". I then had the opportunity to play Super Mario Party and I was not disappointed one iota. They went back to the classic style as before where you don't drive around in some stupid car, and it is every person on a board for themselves. Amazing! They then added a new cooperative game mode, and the little kid in me couldn't have been any happier. There is nothing I like more than co-operative games, or chances to do something with someone else to reach a common goal. I play board games all the time, and co-operative games such as Pandemic are at the top of my list. This new mode pits all players in a raft on a stream working together to complete challenges to continue on their journey and it is fantastic. Thank you Mario for always being there for me, and thank you Nintendo for going back to your roots.

Mario Party has been one of my family's favorite game series to play over the last decade. The classic board game kind of feel to it kept us playing Mario Party 7 for a really long time. Skipped several versions of Mario Party as they introduced kind of strange variations like the car in Mario Party 10. With Super Mario Party, we've pretty much arrived at perfection in the series. There's a co-op river rafting mode where you face challenges together - great for those who want something quick and casual, or those who aren't super competitive. The rhythm game mode is a great choice if you only have a few minutes or want simple instructions. Got my non gamer Mom and brother's wife to play and they had fun, lots of laughs! My brother and I play the partner mode all the time, it's neat to have a mode where it's an open map and you can go almost any direction - extra strategy! My favorite mode is the classic board game mode, but I still appreciate the other modes for the sake of variety. The minigames feel current with easy motion controls and containing things like drones or cameras. Of course, there are still short races and games like the classics. Perfect game for the family or quick sessions with friends! I will say this would probably not be as much fun without a group. Also, I think the game's absurd focus on stickers is mostly for the younger games. Overall - nab it, good one for the Switch library!