Mario Strikers: Battle League
Where do I begin... this game is... dead. Unfortunately after only 1 month of being released it has started to lose all relevancy, lets talk about why shall we? Ugh what a game, I hate to talk bad about it but it just is that. Oh, of course the gameplay is amazing it is Mario Strikers after all, cutthroat soccer. Complicated but really fun to play and difficult to master. So you might be asking, why am I giving it a 1 star review? Well, I can't in good faith give it anything higher knowing it had potential to be SO much more. With 10 characters upon release, no sidekicks like in the previous games, and a shocking lack of single player content, it is a downgrade in nearly every category. First lets talk about the things that are better from Mario Strikers Charged. The graphics have obviously taken a huge leap, this game is gorgeous, most of the time. The game is not notoriously glitchy, but it has its moments and you can get some funny results from it. The Strikers Club is a great idea, but not executed the best. The problems I have from it stem from the main flaws of the game itself, being that there are only 10 characters, but you can have 20 people in a Strikers Club all with their own Striker. So, hypothetically, you could have a strikers club with all waluigis, but don't worry, they can be completely different characters with gear... hang on I have more positives to say. The Hyperstrikes look amazing, the online mode is good in concept, and... I guess the gear looks ok? Seriously I am struggling to find reasons that this game is better than Charged. I guess it's time for the negatives. MAN ok get ready for a lot of them. The characters have all softened up and because much less cutthroat-y than the last games and in turn, while being well defined characters, has lost the "Strikers charm" that the past games had. Everyone is all happy or sad, or in some cases, a little mad but they just shrug it off. The roster of characters is embarrassing, boasting a total 10 characters as compared to the roster from charged with 12 captains and 8 sidekicks to choose from. Because of the lack of characters all matches have become a 4v4 with just main characters to choose from, and because of the online mode being the way it is, you can have two of any character in any normal game mode, one on each team. Adding on to this, Yoshis and Toads can have multiple of them on any team, so you could just play a game with 8 toads. No one needs that much of Toad. Trust me. Time for the Cup Battles, and while they were challenging to a degree, it wasn't challenging to fight them because they were better AI, it was harder because you have your one character you are controller and 3 computer players that never do anything you ask them to do. It just feels unfair unlike the past games where the difficulty came from actually good opponents not better AI. On top of that the game mode is so short, with only 10 cups in total each with at most 5 matches if you lost, which isnt common early on. So 50 matches and its over. Do you get a new character for beating all of the cups? No. Anyways, the stages are a complete downhaul also, with now just 5 stages that can be cut in half to combine with another half for a total of 15 possible stages, aaaand all of them are just reskins of a basic field with no obstacles at all. Yeah, the goalie is the biggest obstacle in any field and it is embarrassing. I could go on and on but I think I shouldn't. You guys wouldn't like that, neither would I (and I would be going on for a while.) I'll just end it at this. Mario Strikers: Battle League was promised DLC to increase the roster size, but since they have waited far too long, people have quit the game already, and it shall go down in history as the worst mario sports game on the Nintendo Switch, easily. Thank you.
