Review: Mario Golf: Super Rush

Mechanically, Mario Golf: Super Rush is the same as it’s always been. Mostly. The easy to use shot gauge is the same as ever, though it now has a couple of tweaks. For starters, no more power shots. They’re now a special shot that you charge up by collecting coins or performing well. Change two, you don’t want to use the full power of your swing because your lie and club will affect your meet area (marked in red at the top of the shot gauge) which, change three, is automatically selected by the game after you choose your power. I guess having the meet area be automatic is more realistic, but its Mario Golf, realism isn’t exactly what I’m expecting. Either way the mechanics are sound.

There is one other major change to the swing mechanics and that’s the ability to use motion controls. They’re optional. This is pretty identical to how Wii Golf ran so there’s no big surprises here. Accuracy wise it can be a little hit or miss since you don’t have the precision of button controls. For serious play it may not be the best control scheme, but if you’re doing Speed Golf with friends then the hectic nature of that combined with the motion controls could be a lot of fun. Just make sure to have a lot of free space around you.

I think I’ve been a little bit spoiled by the old Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance releases of Mario Golf and their superb story modes. In those, you played a brand-new non-Mario character who needed to level up and work their way up the ranks. You’d earn levels by winning tournaments, match plays, and by completing golfing challenges the NPCs issued you. You could even find hidden one up mushrooms to give you a quick level up. With every level you had several stats you could boost: drive, height, shot, meet area, and control. Each one would impact how your character would play. I’m sorry to say that’s pretty much gone for this game. In Golf Adventure (the story mode) you play as your Mii. You’ll still level up by winning tournaments and through the occasional NPC challenge, but there’s no more one up mushrooms and the stats you can improve are greatly reduced. Now when you level up you can put points into power, stamina, speed, control, and spin. All of those except for two affect your actual golf game. The other two, stamina and speed, are solely just for the speed golf events. Stamina is how long you can run, and speed is how fast you can go. Learn to love them because the story mode is entirely focused on speed golf.

Some of the gear you can buy.

A returning feature from Mario Golf World Tour; your Mii can equip various gear. These can be purchased at the shops throughout the game with the coins you collect either on the course or by winning in the tournaments. Unlike the previous game, however, these don’t impact your various stats and instead confer other bonuses in the story mode such as less slowdown when running through a sand trap. You can also equip different clubs that will give your shots different effects like the ability to skip your ball along the water. The game also encourages you to carry only seven clubs to maximize your speed golf performance. You can carry more, but then you get weighed down which affects your running speed. It’s an interesting change, but it’s really only applicable to the story mode.

At every turn the story loves to make excuses why you can’t play a full round of golf at each new course (six total) you travel to. There’s a drought, a landslide, it’s too hot, etc. In its place you’ll do various takes of speed golf where you’ll only play a handful of holes. Win and your player card is updated so you can move to the next course. No course pros, no full tournaments. You can go back later and do the full eighteen holes, but if you’re just playing the story straight through with no backtracking you won’t get that. And that's a shame because these are some cool course designs with many neat Mario extras. A desert course, ice course, and a rocky cliff face course are some of the areas you'll play through. Enemies like Pokeys, Sandmaarghs, Bob-ombs, and more show up as hazards. All of this wild and wacky stuff that the game limits your exposure to because it doesn't want you to play the full course at first.

This is where I started to get sick of the story mode. I’m not playing golf to race through the course as quickly as I can against the NPCs. It might be more fun against other human players since you can interfere with each other, but I just didn’t care. I hated having x amount of time to play six holes and have every swing subtract thirty seconds from your time in addition to the time it takes to run to your ball. It made every round hectic and contrary to the name you still have to take your time to plan your shots because if you didn’t you would most assuredly time out for rushing too much and making poor shots. Thankfully you do have a couple of bosses to fight, which was unexpected, but it came at the very end of the game and they’re all lumped together one right after the other. Sadly, that was when the story mode actually got interesting; right when it was over.

If you’re not interested in the story there are a couple of other modes available. Literally. You can do traditional Stroke Play, Battle Golf, or Speed Golf. They’re available both in online and offline options. All of the extra game modes (except Battle Golf) can be played with any of the six courses. Granted, you need to unlock all of them in the story mode first so you can’t avoid that. Stroke Play is your standard game of golf. Battle Golf takes place in a special arena filled with Mario themed obstacles and can be played with NPCs or three other players. The goal is to capture three of the nine available holes. The catch is that once a hole is captured it’s locked off for anyone else to score in. It’s basically a form of Speed Golf. Speed Golf, well, it’s the same thing that I described from the story mode.

And that’s it. That’s all the extras. There’s no more Ring Shot, no Coin Shoot, or mini-golf. All characters are unlocked from the start so you don’t even have that to do. The cast is pretty varied and diverse though, especially with the addition of newcomers like Pauline and Chargin' Chuck. Star characters are earned just by playing as each character enough. Your Mii will only level up in the story mode. It’s a little disappointing that this is the first Mario Golf console release since Toadstool Tour’s launch in 2003 and it has only a fraction of that game’s modes right now. Nintendo has said that there will be post launch content so hopefully more game modes will get added later.

I really wanted to like Mario Golf: Super Rush, but I don’t. It’s got six interesting courses with a full eighteen holes apiece and a good roster of characters plus an online mode. It’s passable as a golf game and there’s fun extras like the motion control golfing, but it’s lacking the extra modes of its predecessors to really give the game variety. The RPG elements are mostly gone and the base game is pretty sparse on content. Once you beat the story mode all you can do is play the courses again to try and unlock the star characters, but even that is just doing a level up grind with each golfer. With any luck the lack of extras will be remedied with the promised but there is no timeline saying when that’s coming or how much there will be. It’s definitely hard to recommend the game in its current state especially if you don’t like speed golf or you’re looking for a lot of single player content in the form of alternate gameplay modes. If you treat Mario Golf: Super Rush as a party game then you may derive more enjoyment out of it.