Another Mario Party is upon us. Does this one finally deliver an unqualified masterpiece of board game antics and mini-game fun? Maybe, almost, not quite? Initial reviews for Super Mario Party Jamboree are here and while they’re mostly positive, there are also plenty of critiques.
Out October 17 on Nintendo Switch, Mario Party Jamboree is the third installment on the handheld hybrid and it arrives with plenty of new ideas. There are new motion control-centric modes like Toad’s Item Factory and Paratroopa Flight School. The titular Jamboree mechanic refers to allies that players can collect by winning mini-games during matches, while a new Pro Rules setting lets players remove much of the series’ chaotic RNG from the equation.
The results sound mostly positive so far, though the true legacy of a Mario Party game is never revealed until weeks and months into its life when fans have been able to experience every little wrinkle ad nauseum. Jamboree has an 84 on Metacritic so far, higher than both Super Mario Party and Mario Party Superstars. Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert, reviewing the game for GameSpot, praised its maps as some of the best in the series but was less impressed by the variety and creativity of the mini-games.
Catherine Castle, writing for Eurogamer was less impressed still. “It just has the misfortune of not being very fun, and mistakes the volatility of chance and happenstance for being the same thing as competitive satisfaction that comes from playing a good game well,” she wrote. Digital Trends’ Giovanni Colantonio was also down on Jamboree’s mini-games, but was more optimistic about side modes and what they might portend for the future direction of the series.
According to VGC, however, the game is still one of the best in the Mario Party series overall. “It still hasn’t managed to shake some of the core issues of the series (especially when it comes to balancing the game for younger and less experienced players) but judged against previous entries it stands out as a top offering,” reviewer Chris Scullion concluded. Here’s what other reviewers thought of Mario Party’s latest outing on Switch.
Not only does it faithfully return to the classic formula established in the Nintendo 64 entries, it confidently improves upon it with a fantastic set of boards that introduce unique and memorable mechanics. It’s also the most flexible Mario Party has ever been, with tons of ways to customize your game, including its brilliant new optional Pro Rules that reduce luck-based elements to a minimum and crank up the strategy for those who want it.
Super Mario Party Jamboree has the unenviable task of following Superstars, a game composed of the best minigames throughout the entire series. Ultimately, the quality difference is noticeable. Most of the new minigames are fine at best, with some standouts like Slappy Go Round, Prime Cut, and Unfriendly Flying Object. But for every genuine crowd-pleaser, there’s one that would make me groan when it popped up. Gate Key-pers is my least favorite, featuring five keys and three locked gates. Players laboriously rotate through turns as they randomly use keys on doors and try to memorize which combinations were already attempted. It takes forever and really slows down the pacing, which is something numerous minigames are guilty of this time around. More than one minigame also features the mechanic of “pick one of these things and hope no one else picks the same one or it doesn’t count,” which has never been fun even once. I expect a certain amount of nonsense and randomness in a Mario Party game, but Jamboree feels like it’s leaning too far into it at times.
But Jamboree’s most egregious crime is how little it rewards you for actually being good at its sparsely-doled out minigames. Only occurring at the end of each round once everyone’s had their turn, they end up becoming like precious drops of water in the parched desert of interminably long dice rolls. But all you get for doing well in these brief moments of agency is more coins to add to your bulging purse strings, which you’ll regularly struggle to spend because you can never quite land on the right square at the right time – or at least that was my experience anyway. Time and again I’d amass a huge fortune after wiping the floor with my opponents during the minigame sections, but I’d only ever scrape the bottom of the final leaderboard because I’d had bum luck elsewhere.
In general, though, Jamboree is certainly one of the better games in the Mario Party series, certainly when it comes to the sheer volume and diversity of content it boasts. Depending on how long Nintendo continues to support the Switch after its successor is released, this could potentially be the last game in the series to release on the system. If this ends up being the case, it’s a fitting third and final Mario Party on Switch – following the Joy-Con heavy gameplay of Super Mario Party and the old-school focus of Mario Party Superstars, this hits that Goldilocks spot by delivering the best aspects from both.
Circling back to my personal circumstances, it’s important to note that if my family didn’t play Mario Party with me, Mario Party Jamboree would be effectively worthless. You can play just about everything single-player, but the series is only really exciting if you have someone to play it with. That hasn’t changed with Jamboree. You can play it online, but I feel that something is lost when you’re not in the same room as the people you’re stealing stars from. Torpedoing someone’s success just isn’t the same when you can’t hear them mope and/or scream.
Koopathlon is Jamboree’s boldest addition, pitting a player against 19 other characters in a race around a vast race course. As players collect coins in a specific set of minigames, they’ll make greater progress around the course. Bowser games keep things slightly even by having Impostor Bowser send anyone who loses flying backward. As an online session against 19 other random players, this is one of the more enjoyable of the nontraditional Mario Party modes. It only suffers because only eight friends can enter a session at once. This would have been an ideal mode to introduce player lobbies or something that would allow for more friends to jump in.
Super Mario Party Jamboree is a return to form for a series that stumbled as it arrived on the Switch and barely steadied itself with Mario Party Superstars’ greatest hits runout. Jamboree brings creative boards and a range of enjoyable minigames to the table, but overcooks the single-player stuff. Though non-board multiplayer offerings are slim pickings, there’s a feast of Mario Party delights in this one, and as long as you’re happy to play Mario Party as it was meant to be played, you’ll find your fill here.
In trying to digest it all, I find myself a little torn by the eclectic extras. On one hand, they all feel like enjoyable, harmless bonuses. Do they all need to be fully built out when they’re meant to be quick diversions I can chip away at between parties? There’s more fun than dud here, even if I only feel like I’ll get an hour or two out of most modes. There’s another side of me, though, that wonders if all of those extras are a detriment to the core board game. Had Rhythm Kitchen been a smaller minigame, it would have been the most inventive one in the main game. The same goes for Toad’s Item Factory and Paratroopa Flight School, games that would have been more fun as 10- to 30-second snacks. Jamboree is full of great ideas, but too few of them are reserved for its bread-and-butter mode.
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