3.5/5
Available on the Wii
Mario Sports Mix follows the Wii trend of sports games intended for parties or groups of players.
It’s fun, funny, accessible and easy to pick up and put down for either short plays or longer ones.
The game revolves around four sports: Basketball, Dodgeball, Volleyball and Hockey. The premise, revealed when you begin your first tournament, is that some large crystals fell from the sky into the Mushroom Kingdom and were found by the Toad people. Inside the crystals were different sports balls, which were then inserted into trophies and put up for prizes in the relevant sports. That’s about it, let the games begin. As good as any reason to play sports I suppose. I’m not sure it needed even that.
Each time you play a sport for the first time, you are shown the tutorial on how to do so. The tutorials remain available for viewing at the main menu if you wish to see them again.
The sports all have quite similar control mechanics, making it easy to switch between them, i.e. flicking your remote forwards is to go for goal, pressing B uses an item etc. It’s a little more complicated than you really want for a party game to begin with, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes quite easy. There are also control reminders on the pause menu if you need it.
At may seem as though four sports in a game like this aren’t that many and maybe it could use one or two more (football and baseball maybe), but the game packs in quite a bit of variety for each of those that have been included.
The game is similar to Mario Kart in a couple of basic ways. You begin with an ample selection of characters to play as, twelve plus your Miis, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and are able to unlock more as you progress through tournaments, including some Final Fantasy friends. Characters have their own special moves which can be used to cause more mayhem on the pitch.
The stages themselves that the sports take place in are varied too. Each sport has a basic, normal looking stage, but there are also a number of more wacky Mushroom World locations which add extra elements to the game. Donkey Kong Dock games take place on a pair of floating rafts in the jungle which move around, changing the shape of the field. Toad Track takes place in the centre of a Kart race track, with traffic cones causing obstructions which can help or hinder. Once again, you can unlock many more of these as you play through, which gives a good reason to keep playing.
As well as the wackiness provided by Mario characters and the Mushroom Kingdom locations, the addition of items to the well known sports creates another level of tactics. This being a Mario game means that the characters don’t have to be entirely sporting to win games. Hockey matches can degrade into hack’n’slash fights over the puck where you must shake your remote vigorously in order to wrestle it from your opponent.
As well as the four sports, there are a few mini games. They are based on the main sports but have different objectives. For example, instead of shooting for a basketball hoop, players must race to feed Petey Piranha the most fruit.
At times however, the game suffers from being too easy, (for example winning 88-nil at Basketball) though it has multiple difficulty levels, so this can be amended. The ease becomes more frustating as the games seem to last quite some amount of time and begin to drag when you can see that there is no chance of your opponent catching up.
I personally found Dodgeball to be the most entertaining sport. It seemed to have the best AI and be the most challenging without needing to change the difficulty setting. You can also end a game fairly quickly if you can knock out all opponents.
The ease of the game may be attributed to the party nature and the necessity of being accessible for anyone who is not a regular player or also for it to be enjoyed by younger family members.
The game has all the ingredients of a good Mario game: the characters, the locations, the wackiness, the humour, the unlockables; but the finished result is quite average.
For a family with younger children, it is perfect. For a party to pick up and mess around with, it is great. I do not doubt that is what I will mostly use it for. As for playing solo, the main appeal is in the unlocks so that it can be enjoyed more when with friends. Perhaps if there was more variety in it, it would be a better game closer to the Smash Brothers series.
