Mario Party 10 Review

Mario Party is a really weird franchise. My history with it pretty much is exclusive to the Nintendo 64 iterations. I never really got into the Gamecube ones, instead looking at them, foolishly assuming they’d turned into Karaoke games, and leaving them on the shelf. It wasn’t until I hit my late teens and early twenties that I realised I had missed Mario Party for so long and looked to get back into it. Wii Party was great fun. But Mario Party 8 was disappointing. Mario Party 9 had a few nice changes but the stink of unoriginality and repetition was still there. So now we’ve got a proper, full high definition Mario Party 10 with added Amiibo support. The question remains – has Mario Party lost its touch?

There’s three modes you’re introduced to when you first boot up Mario Party 10. Amiibo Party, Bowser Party and Mario Party. We’ll start with the new stuff and jump straight into Amiibo Party. Amiibo Party is compatible with figurines of characters who appear in Mario Party 10 – including Rosalina, Bowser and Donkey Kong. Each Amiibo unlocks a very simplistic square board with a few gimmicks here and there that fit the character. The flow of these matches is almost perfect for fans of the classic Mario Party style. You move around the board, collect coins, buy stars, and play a mini-game at the end of each round. It’s the Mario Party most original fans know and love.

But it’s absolutely marred by some shoddy forced implementation of the Amiibo figurines. First off, players have to select a dice with their Wii Remote and then place their Amiibo on the gamepad and remove it to roll the dice. Secondly, when a player picks up an item on the board, they have to put that Amiibo on the gamepad as well. Whether or not the Amiibo is actually saving anything, it’s an incredibly jarring process that means everyone needs to have an Amiibo and pass around the gamepad just to do what a one button press could easily do in-game. It’s this kind of forced gimmickry that recalls moments of the DS and Wii launches that make Amiibo Party really fall flat. It doesn’t help the boards are quite small and devoid of personality (ie. Not like the main boards) either.

In fact, this is a large issue with Mario Party 10 in general. All the ideas are half baked, which is perplexing considering how long this franchise has had to get it right. But the ideas that work really well are relegated to separate modes, and can’t be enjoyed across the entire package. The idea of playing Mario Party in the classic, old-school mode isn’t doable in either of the other modes – it’s only available in Amiibo Party.

This problem persists into the other new mode – Bowser Party. A five player affair, it has one of the other players controlling Bowser. The player who is Bowser uses the Gamepad, while the other players use the Wii Remote. The goal of Bowser is to deplete the hearts of the other players, which replace the ministars from Mario Party 9 and Mario Party 10’s main mode. Bowser rolls multiple dice in an attempt to catch up to the main crew and steal their stars. Mini-games are a bit different in this mode too – most of them utilise the asymmetric nature of the GamePad and are rather enjoyable, but they’re only available in this mode and only if you’re playing as Bowser. It sounds like a petty complaint but it’d be nice to see the asymmetric elements from Bowser Party incorporated into the other modes rather than restricted to one.

Mario Party mode is pretty familiar to players of the previous Mario Party game. In it, everyone “carpools” together but all bonuses are awarded to whoever is rolling the dice. You no longer buy stars anymore, instead you just collect them as you pass through the board. It’s a different way to play that some people love and some people hate, but personally I think it has its strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, it keeps the game flowing at a much brisker pace than usual – with most matches taking thirty or so minutes to complete rather than upwards of two hours. On the other, some questionable decisions have been made to accommodate this new playstyle.

Arguably, Mario Party has always been about the mini-games. It’s where the more competitive, active aspect of the competition lies. It’s also a large part of the game that is determined by skill rather than luck (in most cases). In Mario Party 10’s classic mode, mini-games are only playable when you land on a space that says so. This means it’s totally possible to play a whole match without playing more than two or three mini-games, which is kind of disappointing.

This new approach completely changes the dynamics of the game. First of all, the strategy in which players approach their turns is slightly different. Let’s say you know that in two turns time your main rival will hit a star checkpoint and be awarded with more mini-stars. You can purposefully use certain dice to slow down the progression of the group so that that person misses out. On the other hand, if you don’t have any special dice, you’ll be leaving everything up to (a literal) roll of the dice.

Of course the mini-games are the true star of the party and honestly, when you’re actually playing them in Mario Party 10 they rarely disappoint. Some are really fast and frenetic, others are slower but tenser. But all in all, they’re easily the best part about the game – and thankfully there’s quite a few here to keep players going – and even better, if you’re into them, a mode lets you play just them for as long as you like.

Some of my favourites are the boss mini-games, which have players playing together a single enemy but at the same time competing against one another to come out as the strongest player. It’s this mix of co-operative and competitive play that makes Mario Party it’s most endearing, but some of these moments are borrowed from previous games so they’re not necessarily new.

But what’s most disappointing about Mario Party 10 and easily is its biggest shortcoming is just how weak it feels in terms of content. The main Mario Party mode only comes with five boards which feels incredibly anaemic considering that the last game had at least seven. The Amiibo bards are a nice touch but they’re too small – in fact even developing these into something a  little more substantial might’ve made Mario Party 10 feel a little bit more complete. Sure, you’ve got a Tetris-like sub-mode that has two player support too but it just doesn’t feel like Mario Party 10 wasn’t ready – that it’s guests arrived way before Mario and his friends finished preparing (sorry, I had to).

On the plus side the game does look pretty impressive, being the series’ first foray into high definition. Menus and the user interface are especially bold and colourful and as a result Mario Party 10 is never a game that’s particularly hard to look at. It runs smoothly. Some of the worlds are erring onto the side of generic, however, so perhaps in the future it’d be nicer to see more original experiences borrowed from Mario’s incredibly storied history rather than a rather typical water world, desert world or lava world.