Katharine Castle
It’s the biggest Mario Party game yet, but fails to find the fun at almost every step.
Is it really time for another Mario Party game already? With Jamboree marking the third get-together on Switch for NintendoCube’s long-running minigame marathon, it barely seems long enough to have got the last one out of our system, let alone had time to start craving yet another merry-go-round of Mario-based board game antics. In its defence, one of Jamboree’s main attractions is how it’s tried to fix a lot of the flaws partygoers had with its various predecessors. It finally introduces online party modes, for example, has the highest number of minigames ever included in the series (over 110, if you’re keeping count), as well as a handful of special motion-control modes, and a full-blown single-player campaign for those unfortunate souls who don’t have the benefit of three other nearby friends to play local co-op with them.
On paper, it’s a veritable feast of bite-sized party food to enjoy, and as with previous Mario Party games, it’s often handsomely presented. But just because this is the biggest Mario Party game there’s ever been doesn’t also mean it’s the most fun, as once you start looking more closely at that so-called banquet in front of you, you realise that, oh no, these aren’t delicious sugary treats you want to stuff your face with; they’re actually all fruit sticks and bland celery batons that taste like the dying gasp of waterlogged cardboard, and there’s nothing but the weakest orange squash imaginable to wash it all down with. Apologies if you do, in fact, like diluted squash and celery sticks as your go-to nibble spreads, but from where I’m sitting at least, Super Mario Party Jamboree is one of the least nutritiously satisfying games I’ve played in some time.
I’ll begin with the disclaimer that if you’re already of the view that Mario Party is good and fun and not at all a worse-than-Monopoly-at-Christmas affair, Jamboree is exactly that and more of it. As a result, you’ll likely have as much fun with this latest iteration as you have with all previous Mario Party games, so job done, you can probably stop reading now. For those wondering if this might be the one Mario Party game to finally dip your toes into, though, I’d advise caution. Partly because, due to the idiosyncrasies of Nintendo’s review process, I’ve been limited to just playing in local co-op ahead of its full release, meaning I’ve been unable to sample its 20- and 8-player online multiplayer modes at time of writing.
But even without passing judgement on Jamboree’s online offering, I’m not convinced either mode would be strong enough to redeem what is arguably one of the least thrilling party games I’ve ever had to endure. Even if you put aside the board game element of it for a second and just want full, untethered access to its 100+ minigames, the number of hoops you have to jump through before you can even get to ‘Minigame Bay’ (as it’s called here) will likely kill any excitement you had dead in the water. There are cutscenes, dialogue boxes, and menu screens aplenty to skip through, and nothing is ever as quick or immediate as you want it to be for just ‘dipping in’ for a round of your favourite friendship breakers.
Trouble is, despite the sheer quantity of minigames here, most are just reheated servings of the same basic concepts: jump over this thing, dodge that thing, last the longest doing all of the above. There are some exceptions, of course – a good handful fall into the furious waggling category, there are guessing games, spot the difference puzzles, and some very sedate races. But there are lots of variations on a theme here, and finding any great go-to games to even call your favourites doesn’t come as naturally as you’d hope. If you ask me, the truly great minigames of our time are the ones you can obsess over for hours – the likes of Super Monkey Ball‘s Monkey Target, for example, or Splatoon‘s OG waiting game Squid Jump. But there’s nothing like that here in Jamboree, and only a handful really stick in the memory.
Prime Cut – a 2v2 game about sawing surprisingly juicy steaks in half so they’re as close to 50:50 as possible – is one such highlight, as is Sandwiched, in which everyone must avoid being squashed by (also strangely succulent-looking) sandwich squares falling from on high. Soup Troupe is a natty little rhythm banger, too, where Joy-Cons become giant comedy knives to slice veggies in time with the beat (and it’s not just the foodie ones I like, I swear). The rest, though? A big old mush that feels largely indistinct from one game to the next.
The new ‘Showdown’ minigames do buck this trend to some degree, if only because they’re substantially longer gauntlets than most of their one-and-done stablemates. These are one of the more unique twists in Super Mario Party Jamboree, and the main event of its proper Mario Party boards. The basic concept of Mario Party remains the same as ever: everyone rolls a dice to travel round a large, sprawling board, and the winner is the one with the highest number of stars at the end. This time, though, a Jamboree Buddy will occasionally appear on the board, and everyone must go head-to-head across multiple minigame rounds to get them on side. Given how much these Jamboree Buddies can potentially supercharge your dice rolls – letting you act twice per turn, buy stars for half price, as well as benefit from a myriad of other buffs and boons that are specific to each character for a limited number of turns – these showdowns really do live up to their name a lot of the time, and the stakes feel appropriately high for what lies at the end of them.
They’re a rare bright spot in its otherwise quite turgid board game segments, though some, of course, are more memorable than others. Waluigi’s Showdown easily sits at the bottom of the pile with its solitary (and very anti-party) minutes-long games of pinball (made even more miserable in handheld mode when you’ve still only got a quarter of the screen to squint at). His brother’s game show quiz, on the other hand, is a triumph, regularly capturing that manic WarioWare energy to really fray your nerves and reaction times. Others, though, still fall foul of that dreary dodge/jump/dodge/jump dynamic that’s so rampant elsewhere (Daisy, Peach and Bowser Jr, I’m looking at you). They’re engaging enough in the moment, but due to their elongated play time, they all share one big problem – and that’s how easy it is for early frontrunners to run away with it. If you feel yourself falling behind at any point, there’s rarely much opportunity to pull things back from the brink, and it’s this lack of strategy and tactical to-and-fro that ultimately brings Jamboree to its knees. After all, there’s nothing more fatal to having fun than a foregone conclusion.
This sense of inevitability bleeds through to the rest of Jamboree’s offerings as well, not least in Mario Party proper. If waiting for each player to take their turn doesn’t end up grating on your nerves, the uneven star economy definitely will, as there simply aren’t enough of them in play to make it feel like a real competition. Games I played with friends would frequently have everyone stuck on just one or two stars apiece for the majority of each match, which doesn’t create nearly enough tension or the feeling that there’s everything to play for.
What’s more, if an AI character was in play, they’d frequently muscle into the top spots in what felt like the most underhand ways possible, seemingly always managing to bag the ‘bonus’ and ‘hidden’ stars for themselves somehow (much like how they’re always able to score a perfect 100% in every single rhythm game without fail – I’m not bitter, I promise). Thankfully, these extra stars can be tweaked or squashed entirely with the new Pro Rules option, which does make the playing field feel mildly more equitable as a result.
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. I get that all’s fair in love and war and all that, but when the route to victory seems to lie so firmly in fortuitous flukes rather than hard-won ability, it can’t help but leave everything feeling a bit arbitrary as a result.
Super Mario Party Jamboree also commits that cardinal sin of gatekeeping its more advanced and most imaginative boards behind a wealth of tedious busywork. The four available by default are all inventive enough in their own right (if a little sprawling and overly long), but if you want to play all seven and unlock the trap-stuffed (and literal prison) of King Bowser’s Keep, the airborne cloud tunnels of Mario’s Rainbow Castle, or the returning cowboy-themed Western Land, you’ll need to spend several hours completing its single-player campaign first, and earn enough Party Points by playing the game more generally to get your player rank up to gold status. Sure, this gives the whole thing a bit of structure and sense of progression and what not, but the onus is very much on you, the single player, putting the work in beforehand, rather than collectively unlocking things as you play with your mates. It’s not a party when you’re the one stuck with all the homework, and mentally, I’m back thinking about all those menus getting in the way of playing a single minigame again. There are just so many barriers to having fun here, and I’m not sure that making Mario Party more laborious than it already is was ever very high on anyone’s wishlist of improvements.
Besides, if having a more clearly defined structure was truly important to Jamboree’s overall appeal, then it could stand to make the rest of its modes feel more unified with its main party efforts, rather than leaving them divorced and easily ignored as you slowly spin round its archipelago of menu islands. The 1-2 player Paratroopa Flight School is novel enough to flap your dual JoyCon-laden arms about in once or twice, for example, but apart from being quite physically exhausting to play for long periods of time, its co-operative Crazy Taxi-style delivery game and competitive Sky Battle modes don’t really feel like they’ve got a single party bone in their body – as if they’ve been parachuted in from some long-lost Mario Kart game.
Toad’s Item Factory is another mode that feels out of place, too, with its deathly dull motion-controlled machinery puzzles feeling like they’ve been scrapped out of Nintendo Land’s trash compactor. Only Rhythm Kitchen has any kind of lasting pull and appeal, but all this mode does is repackage the same musical cooking games available elsewhere into a Yoshi-themed Great British Bake Off-infused fever dream. That’s the problem with the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach – it looks like you’re getting loads for your money, until you see it for what it really is.
As I said right at the top, there’s nothing fundamentally offensive about Super Mario Party Jamboree. It’s perfectly fine and agreeable in places, and there are little touches here and there that sometimes remind you of that old Nintendo charm – like the little character reaction emojis you can deploy during other people’s turns to let out cries of ‘Betrayal!’ and ‘Whaaat?’ at comedic moments. 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. Maybe Nintendo Cube will strike a better balance on the next try with Mario Party – though given we’re already 12 games deep at this point (and that’s just counting the mainline entries), maybe it’s time to finally take a longer break from this series and go back to a leaner, more fundamental kind of drawing board.
A copy of Super Mario Party Jamboree was provided for review by Nintendo.
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