I enjoy the Mario Party games. I started playing the series with Mario Party 8 on the Nintendo Wii. The Wii’s remote made the mini-games incredibly fun, and the “board game” like game play made it seem that no two games would ever be the same. But as time went on, it did get boring, especially when in-game events could wipe out a win on the last turn and send a dominating player to last place, negating any skill and luck needed to win a game.
Sadly, Mario Party 10 on the Nintendo Wii U is pretty much more of the same. I mean it has some new features, including Amiibo support and an actual full-on Amiibo game mode, and Bowser is included in new and exciting ways, but when you drill down to the core of the game, Mario Party 10 is ground already covered.
One of 70 new mini games, but don’t worry if you don’t have the skills to play them. It doesn’t matter in the end.
The HD graphics are gorgeous, which has become a Wii U signature, and the game is fun. But again, fortunes fold on the roll of the dice and superiority in the game’s myriad mini games means absolutely nothing. Mario Party 10 celebrates ineptitude and luck as much as skill and savvy. The new boards are well thought out and designed, and there are over 70 mini games crammed into the title, but none of that matters when a player has no control over the final outcome of a game. And that is incredibly frustrating.
The Amiibo support comes in the way of special, red-based characters for the principals: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Toad and Bowser, meaning yes, you will need to rush out to six or seven different stores twice a week and try to get them all, since Nintendo has no idea how the laws of supply and demand work. The Amiibos are used in one game mode, and while it tries to add something unique to the experience, the constant need to tap the Amiibo to the gamepad (which essentially sits there only for the purpose of receiving the taps) gets old quick.
Each Amiibo character has a character-specific board embedded in their base.
Each Amiibo character comes with a unique character-themed board to play on, which sounds neat, and any innovation that MP 10 tries to bring to this aging game series is tied in that fact. The drawback is that you have to have at least one of the Amiibos to play, so if you’ve avoided the headache that is Amiibo collecting, this mode is locked out to you. In addition to the character-specific boards, players can also unlock new figure bases and other in-game goodies and “level up” their little plastic statue, which essentially means nothing other than bragging rights. Par for the course if you’ve had the pleasure (using the term loosely) of previous Amiibo exposure.
The Bowser mode is fun, as one player uses the Wii U’s Gamepad to control King Koopa, and the other players (human or CPU) use Wii remotes. Bowser makes up for being outnumbered by using extra dice on his rolls and a few spinner bonuses that level the playing field immensely. The Gamepad’s features do come into play here, but the mode gets boring quick, as Nintendo chose to give Bowser the neat Gamepad, while everyone else in the room suffers with nine-year-old Wii remote technology.
The classic Mario Party mode is where the meat of the game lies, and if you’ve carefully read this review, you understand that it may not be a good thing. Mario Party 10 brings back the MP 9 play design of all the characters grouped together in a vehicle going around the game board together, as opposed to an actual board game scenario where the roll of the die dictates where the characters are on the board. This “grouping” takes away from the thrill of competition, and it really shows its ugly head when the player in control is the one who is penalized when landing on bad space. And landing on these bad spaces happens way too often.
The level of frustration that occurs when victory is taken from you three spaces from the finish because a CPU-controlled Toad happened to land on a special bonus space and roll a high number is ridiculous. I’ve had half my stars taken from me, putting me from a comfortable lead in first place to dead last. This negates all the good will that had been built up from the rest of the game. The fun boards and neat mini games are all wiped away because someone at Nintendo thought it’d be fun to yank the rug out from underneath the players at the very end. As you can probably tell, it happens to me more often than not, and I don’t like it.
The game boards are huge in MP 10.
Mario Party 10 is still a fun game to play, even though we’ve been playing it since the Nintendo 64 days. When given a chance to innovate on the Wii U, Nintendo turned to Amiibos for help, but since you can’t find them in stores, that blew up in their face much like a surprise gift from Bowser, Jr. The use of the Wii U’s Gamepad is limited, showing once again how Nintendo has fumbled something that could have easily been great and instead left us with frustration and anguish.
As you can probably imagine, the game plays best with human players sitting around and playing together, but skill means nothing in Mario Party 10. It usually still comes down to the luck of the die roll, making Mario Party less of a board game, and more of a game of chance. The question is, is it a chance that gamers will want to take?
Mario Party 10 is available now exclusively for the Wii U. This review is based off a copy of the game purchased at retail.
