The Good
- Solid Mario style Game on Mobile
- Smooth graphics and Gameplay
- Fun Gameplay in some modes
The Bad
- Regular price is too high ($10)
- Repetitive Gameplay
- Toad Rally is Lame
In Depth
Nintendo is slowly making their way to mobile with a few of their flagship series, namely Pokemon and Super Mario Brothers. They still aren’t putting out straight ports of the classics yet, but hopefully they will come around. Hopefully when they do they don’t flub it and overprice everything the way Square has done with it’s Final Fantasy ports. Mario’s first mobile foray is Super Mario Run, on Android and iOS.
Super Mario Run is a combination of quick repeatable mobile gameplay and classic Mario gameplay. The overall feel and look is similar to the New Super Mario Brothers games, 2D side scrolling with 3D objects and sprites. The main catch is that Mario is always moving to the right. The game is designed to be played with one hand, and your only real control is to tap to jump. It’s not really an endless runner, but it sort of plays like one. The game is divided up into several levels and game modes, Tour, which is the standard single player campaign, Toad Rally, which is an online competitive game, and the new Remix 10, which is short bursts of very short levels.
There is also a Kingdom Builder mode which ties everything together and sort of serves as the purpose and end goal to every other mode. As you gather Toads to your kingdom, your castle will level up to return to it’s former glory. You also will gain new buildings to unlock and build in the kingdom and the ability to expand into other areas, increasing the size of your build space. It’s neat, but serves no real purpose. The toads will dance around the buildings but they are mostly decorative and placing a bunch of statues has the same effect as placing a bunch of Toad houses. There are a handful of buildings which can be used to unlock simple mini games to gain Toad Rally Tickets, but they are in the minority of buildings you will unlock. This mode is also limited a bit in how many spaces are available to build on. This can be a little frustrating since it will very often mean choosing what you want to build too often and you’ll end up with a large bank fo unused buildings by simply not having room.
You primarily gather Toads by playing Toad Rally. This is also my biggest gripe with this game. Toad Rally is incredibly tedious. You sort of play against other players, but it’s not real time. It’s also not clear if it’s an actual play through of that player either, since often the ghosts will be different each round. Most of these Toad Rallies are decided by whomever manages to get a Star power up as well, making most rounds one sided at one point. The number of Toad Rally courses isn’t particularly varied and some stages are extra annoying to play such as Ghost houses, which require a lot of downtime waiting for Boos and looping through the same screen or the Airship levels, which usually result in a lot of deaths due to the constant pits between platforms and the unpredictability of cannons and enemies. This exacerbates the tedium of these levels because even when you win the round, the scores are so low you will only earn a small handful of Toads of the corresponding color. So, for example, you’ll get to play a LOT of repetitive Ghost House levels in order to get anywhere in collecting Purple Toads.
The new mode, Remix-10 is the new primary way to unlock items for your Kingdom, and it’s the closest mode to an Endless runner game that there is. It gets a little old but I find it to be the most fun of the various modes. You play through ten very short, maybe 10-20 second levels of varying types in a row each session. Even if you die on a segment, you just move on to the next segment. The only real objective is you pass ten levels, even if you die on all ten, though along the way you collect Rainbow Coins which unlock special bonus items. You also get an item after each segment of ten. In general, the mode is very generous with item drops. The problem ends up being the one mentioned previously, where you run out of room. Unlocking more space means building bridges, which means collecting a TON of Toads in the lame Toad Rally.
The last major mode is the Tour Mode. This is the more traditional single player game. There are 6 regular worlds, each with 4 levels each (3 normal and a castle/Airship). After finishing the main run you unlock the Star World which consists of 9 levels unlocked by completing special tasks. Playing Tour serves several purposes. Completing tour unlocks Princess Peach as a playable character. Completing worlds adds more variety to the playable levels in Toad Rally. You also have the opportunity in each level to collect 5 special coins which often require tricky moves and techniques.
There are certainly a lot of opportunities here for Classic Mobile Game Micro transactions. The Toad Rally tickets is the most obvious choice, special buyable items would certainly be another. Thankfully, Super Mario Run has no micro transactions. It’s Free to Play, but it’s more like a Shareware title. The only thing you can purchase is the full game unlock. You can play the first three levels and Toad Rally for free, but to get more, you’ll need to pay up. This brings up the other big downside to this title. It’s fun, there’s quite a bit to do, it’s not really $10 fun. There is a sale going on (as of this review) that may come back again some time, for half off. At five dollars, the game feels really worth it. Everything is just too repetitive for $10. You can buy full on Mario games for $10, or a lot of other games with more game play. Maybe if Toad Rally were less tedious making the Kingdom Builder more robust and less limited, it would be worth more, maybe.
