Mario Party: Star Rush (3DS)

The Mario Party series presents a set of virtual board games supplemented by minigames, but simply adding extra activities between the rounds of rolling dice doesn’t exactly feel like it’s taking full advantage of it being a video game. Mario Party: Star Rush presents the idea that players should be able to take their turns at the same time, the game itself to make sure no cheating or funny business happens as everyone else is focused on how they’re traveling the board. This sounds fine on the surface, it can speed up play even though it makes players less likely to notice what other players are up to and it could be easy to miss vital information as well, but if the game draws attention to important actions taken then it might just be a way to speed up play. However, in trying to figure out ways to shake up its virtual board game design, Mario Party: Star Rush ends up pursuing far too many ideas at once, leading to things getting messy in a few different ways.

Mario Party: Star Rush doesn’t put forth any story, just throwing you into a plaza where you can pick which mode you want to play. Toad Scramble is certainly the main mode though based on how much effort was put into its design, there being 15 game boards in total that can cover a range of ideas like boards built atop cakes or ones set in haunted mansions. You and three other players will be rolling a virtual die to traverse these boards which are often fairly small, and yet your die that can roll anywhere from 1 to 6 can sometimes feel paltry should you land on the lower numbers, mainly because of how these compact boards are designed. Your main goal in Toad Scramble is to earn Stars and there are two ways to earn them. One is to participate in the Boss minigames, play lasting in Toad Scramble until every boss on the board has been defeated one after the other. The other way to earn Stars comes at the end of a round of play, the coins you had gathered being automatically redeemed with each ten coins equating to one Star added to your count.

However, collecting coins is an incredibly imperfect system. During your time exploring the boards you can move in four directions and they can have rather open designs with many empty spaces that have no value if you land on them. Sometimes coins may occupy these spaces, but the first player to pass over them will collect them, and what’s more, Allies will be randomly set down on the board periodically. While you only play as a color-coded mushroom-headed Toad normally, you can find more recognizable characters from the Super Mario franchise like Mario, Donkey Kong, and Daisy who will join your team once you run into them. They have specific dice with characters like Waluigi having higher numbers but risky lows but even the computer players make no secret that it’s wiser to go for an ally like Toadette instead since she consistently rolls 3s and 4s. While your active character determines your specific die, the others in the team can also add 1 or 2 to your movement rolls, and soon things start to come into focus on how imbalanced this system can be. Getting an ally or getting coins is a first come, first served sort of deal, although if you and another player pass over them at the same time, the game will just pick one of you to get an ally despite movement being an important resource you can’t afford to squander on blind luck.

Luck is far too heavy handed in general though, as if you roll a 1 or 2 too often early in the game, you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose. There’s little in the way to steal from other players, and by getting allies early, a lucky player can turn a nice start into a constant snowball of snagging coins, allies, and getting to the Boss minigames first. The player who initiates a Boss minigame gets to attempt them right away, but based on your distance from the boss, you need to mash A rapidly for a while to be able to join in. With Stars and Coins being the game deciding resources, Mario Party: Star Rush is certainly designed around the idea that the rich will get richer, and there’s not much the lagging players can do about it. Item spaces exist, but reducing a player’s roll by 2 won’t matter much if they’re flush with allies, and while you can get Mushrooms that add to your own roll, it’s still likely you’ll be playing catch-up unless the other players make outright bad decisions. It’s far too easy for a player in the lead to keep denying the others what they need to mount a comeback, and what’s odder is how Mario Party: Star Rush decided to reframe minigames.

In a normal Mario Party game, a minigame happens after each turn, meaning even if you’re rolling poorly, you can accumulate coins by performing well in more active little games that then can pay off later as you use the coins for big plays. Mario Party: Star Rush will not have any post-turn minigames, they must be triggered by hitting balloons around the board where there’s usually only one or two in play. The Duel Balloon at least lets you steal a character from another player if you win, but the Coin Balloon’s payout is paltry and what’s worse, everyone gets coins no matter how they perform. The player who wins the game gets 5 and the player in last gets only 1, but second and third place get 4 and 3 coins respectively, meaning if you want to earn coins for that post-game Star payout, you’re actually donating a minimum of 8 coins to the opposition and potentially more if they tie. There are only 24 minigames available through the balloons and they get stale very quickly even though a player in the lead really could just avoid them and further starve the opposition. Some minigames like Piece of Cake where you try to cut a cake to expose the fruit within properly are too easy to fail after you understand it but Splat-A-Stamp is fine with players trying to cover more of a stamp with their sling-shotted paint, but between not coming up often enough and not feeling too rewarding to win, the minigames do feel a weak part of Toad Scramble save for the Boss minigames.

Stripped of some of the unfairness inherent in letting the player who reaches them first get a head start, the Boss minigames could have worked but are also let down by some choices. A player is joined by all their allies as computer controlled assistants in the game and won’t lose a player points even if they mess up, being a pure benefit for that player who’s already likely in the lead. Bowser Jr.’s Pound for Pound at least feels competitive as everyone scrambles to pound buttons as the boss attacks you and King Bob-Omb’s Boom D’etat is a mad scramble to load cannons with bombs before they blow up on you, but other Boss minigames are deliberately slow to potentially let others catch up like a tedious rhythm game where you only do one action per turn or Kamek’s Card Tricks where you basically play Memory for multiple rounds. These grow even more repetitive than regular minigames though because while you need to clear 3 to 5 Boss minigames to finish a round of Toad Scramble, there are only nine unique bosses available plus three Bowser minigames exclusive to certain boards. Repetition and an over-reliance on luck color the Toad Scramble experience throughout, and even the Bonus Coins handed out at the end of the round to try and upset the “rich get richer” design come up short. Players who moved the fewest spaces or collected the fewest allies might be rewarded pity coins but too few to make a huge difference, and then sometimes the coins instead go to people who moved the most which is just another way where compounding fortune can build up even further.

If Toad Scramble was all Mario Party: Star Rush had to offer it would be a complete misfire of a game, but there are other modes unlocked through play. Gradually you’ll earn points towards your Party Level, this actually being where the titular Star Rush comes in as its simply just an extra bit of credit towards your Party Level if you get well beyond the expected stars in a Toad Scramble board. Balloon Bash is sort of a pared down version of Toad Scramble that removes things like Allies and Boss minigames to its benefit, although the boards are even smaller and there’s only 3 maps available. Balloon Bash makes earning Stars more active though as you need to reach special Star Balloons and actually pay your coins during the game itself to earn Stars. However, there can still be aggravating moments like you and another player hitting the Star Balloon space at the same time and the game just hands it over to one of you randomly and low dice rolls can still be hugely damaging, although minigames are actually pushed to the fore here. Coin Balloons are more common and outright unavoidable at times and the winners get a lot more for winning so they’re not so bad to grab, but there’s not much else going on besides running around cramped maps popping balloons and maybe using items from time to time so this mode does feel too basic to supplant Toad Scramble despite that mode’s more apparent flaws.

Some salvation can be found in modes that don’t care much for the board game side of things, Coinathlon technically containing some but it’s more a mad dash that makes strong use of a small selection of tailor made minigames for its fun. In Coinathlon you don’t control your board movement with a die but instead need to collect coins to cover a huge circuit, players needing to clear a certain amount of laps first to come out on top. Coins are earned through a set of three cycling minigames selected from a set of twelve, but these minigames are played separately from other players and are solely focused on grabbing coins. Steal Diver will have you dodging spike balls in a submarine to grab coins, Silver Lining has you bounce around clouds in the sky to grab them, and House of Boos has you in a Pac-Man style maze avoiding ghosts as coins appear to grab. The best coin games essentially ask you to make quick judgment calls on what to go for to earn more coins and keep ahead of the pack, but you also can earn items to sabotage other players. Lightning can slow down another person’s minigame while a Lava Bubble will burn away their screen to clear away the coins they could have grabbed for a small reset, and while some minigames like the Goomba shooting cannon game feel like you aren’t given much wiggle room to fail or perform better, Coinathlon still feels competitive, allows for comebacks through its items throwing things out of whack, and some of the minigames are just fun on their own merits to boot.

Not every extra mode is quite as big a saving grace or dealbreaker. Boo’s Block Party is a decent if not too creative match-three puzzler where you spin the pieces in the board to change which number they show to make matches, and this provides its gameplay style just fine. Rhythm Recital though is an incredibly basic and poorly mapped rhythm game, because while you’re playing recognizable music from Mario games, your instruments don’t even try to match their equivalents in the song and you don’t even feel like you’re being told to match the beats much as you press a single button in time with on-screen prompts. Mario Shuffle pitches itself as a strategic board game where you move characters through three lanes and try to reach the opposite side of the board, but the two players are given their own halves to start from and can interfere with each other when they pass. The board in Mario Shuffle has spaces that send you forward or back spots and nominally you’re meant to roll two dice, pick which of your three characters utilize them that turn, and try to pick a winning way to proceed, but if you roll doubles all three pieces move and your plans are often ruined and once you do start getting characters across the board and find yourself forced to use bad rolls on the ones left, it feels like strategy gives way to monotony. Challenge Tower is at least a decent thinking man’s minigame, it essentially Minesweeper by way of a giant tower. Scaling up its side one light-up panel at a time, the light on the panel tells you if its safe to move or if there are dangerous tiles nearby that will zap you if you go onto them, and you use the light clues to find a safe path. Challenge Tower isn’t too hard to figure out but still keeps you thinking enough it’s not boring, but when it, Coinathlon, and maybe Boo’s Block Party and sometimes Balloon Bash are left to counteract the flaws in the other modes, they can’t quite redeem this odd shake-up of the Mario Party formula.

THE VERDICT: Mario Party: Star Rush’s main mode of Toad Scramble is a mess of ideas that weren’t considered in tandem, ideas like Allies adding to your die rolls leading to a game where the rich get richer and can easily deny the other players chances at comebacks. This is before you add in the repetitive Boss minigames that aren’t always the best designed to start with, but Toad Scramble not being the only mode on offer means there are at least a few areas of fun to find where you aren’t being undone by a few early bad rolls. Coinathlon puts much of your success in your own hands in its coin minigames with some proper comeback opportunities and ideas like Challenge Tower and Boo’s Block Party work for what they are, but then the similar virtual board game Balloon Bash can struggle as it feels like Mario Party: Star Rush didn’t test out ideas like simultaneous play much, leading to frustrating slogs if you’re not the lucky one to get off to a good start.

And so, I give Mario Party: Star Rush for Nintendo 3DS…

A BAD rating. Toad Scramble is the kind of game mode that only really works until you have a good understanding of how it’s played, and then you start to realize how stacked against certain players it will end up being. Advantages are given out too freely to players who do not need them, the availability of allies with no strong equalizers to stop those who grab them early dragging down the play for those who fortune didn’t randomly favor early on. Coins are not treated as the useful back-up resource they should be. When you can steal coins it’ll be a pittance like 2 or at best 5 and yet chances to earn them again come in either small amounts or you end up granting a good amount of coins to the opposition in the process, negating the potential advantage. It’s hard to come up with ways to overcome a deficit, and that’s before you even factor in the Boss minigames that are overused and underpopulated. Coinathlon’s 12 minigames are smartly designed to keep putting up a fight even if you end up playing them frequently because they’re variable and disruptions are possible, and it’s a shame that more thought seems to have gone into balancing this side mode than the main board game play. Then again, it’s things like Coinathlon that can keep the experience somewhat afloat after you realize the structural flaws elsewhere. Partner Party in Super Mario Party would actually clean up Toad Scramble’s ideas a fair bit, partly just by adding end-of-turn minigames and making coins a proper resource again, but Toad Scramble tried to change far too much without thinking of how the different ideas held together, leading to an imbalanced mess and one made worse as players lag behind and feel the sting of simple things like a bad roll much more harshly than those who just happened to get a few good rolls out of the gate.

The simultaneous play in Mario Party: Star Rush does feel like a weak idea as well, mainly because it likely lead to some simplification and moments like the game just handing one player a Star Balloon or Ally to a player for no reason are game changing yet arbitrary. In a board game it’s actually enjoyable to see the shifting fortunes as everyone takes their turns and in Mario Party it allows you to better plan your use of items or other disruptive forces. It isn’t necessarily a doomed idea in a more conducive board game setting, but Mario Party: Star Rush keeps certain ideas from the main series but tosses out others and ends up with ideas that disagree with each other and fundamentally upset what makes a virtual board game entertaining. You know there will be luck involved but there should be avenues for a crafty or skilled player to tip the scales, but Toad Scramble is skewed towards the winner so they keep winning instead, and the other modes only barely keep it from being easily identified as an obvious low point for the series.