While I love Nintendo nostalgia as much as any other 30-something locked in generational arrested development, the things that make Super Rush sing - and what I predict will make it memorable for a younger generation, the way Advance Tour is for my own - are its twists on the formula. That the future of Mario Party involves taking inspiration from the N64 era suggests this may be the beginning of a trend. Mario Golf: Super Rush feels, in many ways, like Nintendo finally listening to its fans, creating a game that returns to what worked. Outside of the obvious exception - Mario Kart 8 - Nintendo has struggled to find the fun in Mario’s hobbies. And not for a lack of trying! Camelot’s Mario Tennis Aces came close with its strong arcade gameplay, but dropped the ball with a crummy story mode. Mario Party, the various Mario RPGs, and particularly the Mario sports entries have mostly floundered over the past 10 years and change. In fact, the platformers have been so consistently strong, it’s felt as though the company left nothing in the tank for its many Mario-focused spinoffs. Across the Wii U and Switch, Nintendo has released fantastic mainline entries in 2D and 3D, and even let players create their own stages with Super Mario Maker. When it comes to platformers, Mario has been on a decadelong hot streak. Then again, I didn’t expect a Mario sports game to be this great. I didn’t expect my most intense gaming moments of 2021 to come from a golf game. However, you have a limited amount of time to climb to the ball between each stroke, so hitting the golf ball up the mountains on your first shot will make for a tricky, Breath of the Wild-esque hike up a cliffside with little time for error. My personal favorite location is a mountainous open world in which you can complete a nine-hole course in whichever order you please. Other clubs don’t care what place you finish in, so long as you complete each hole within a certain amount of time. Some rulesets require players to focus on completing a hole before their competitors. How this course trotting impacts the experience depends on the course terrain and the club rules. Image: Camelot Software Planning/Nintendo Each swing of your club builds up energy for a powerful strike that will send your ball even further and potentially knock away your competitors - and their golf balls - in the process. You manage a depleting stamina bar, collecting hearts that allow for flashy speed boosts. You now dash to your ball between strokes, sprinting across the fairway alongside other golfers. But Super Rush diverges from Advance Tour in one huge way: As the title implies, you have to hurry. It is, superficially speaking, the exact thing fans have been requesting since 2004’s Mario Golf: Advance Tour - it’s a simple RPG with lots of cheesy conversations, a zero-to-hero quest, and constant upgrades that provide that hit of progress. If you want to see the very best of the best for your platform(s) of choice, check out Polygon Essentials. When we award a game the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the title is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games. I’d hate to spoil the deeply weird turns this story takes, so I’ll just say there are boss fights and a surprising amount of Wario and Waluigi. You’ll rapidly collect clubs with quirky benefits and gradually improve from rookie to something else. Every challenge, small and large, rewards experience points, which can be spent to improve the power of your swing, the control of your shots, and a handful of other variables. You play as a Mii of your own design and visit a variety of colorful locales, each with its own 18-hole golf course, tournament, climate, shop, and talkative townspeople. Camelot, the studio responsible for both the best and the worst Mario Golf games, has cobbled together something new, taking the series’ best bits and binding them with one of the strangest and most significant tweaks to a major sports game since the “action sports” era of NFL Blitz.īut before I get to that, I have to answer the one big question for longtime fans of the series: Yes, there’s a story mode in Mario Golf: Super Rush, and yes, it’s quite compelling. Mario Golf: Super Rush is a brilliant revival of one of Nintendo’s oldest spinoffs, and it’s unquestionably the best Mario sports title since the days of the GameCube and Game Boy Advance.
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