Mario Party remains untouched by the wheel of time. No matter the decade, or the tools, there will always be room for another Mario Party, and it will always be embraced with the same level of fervour and appreciation.
During a recent preview session, GamesHub was able to get hands-on with the latest game in the series, Super Mario Party Jamboree, and found a real sense of familiarity in its design – its gameplay, boards, and mini-games. What was most clear is that while Mario Party is approaching its 26th anniversary, it’s showing no signs of ageing, changing, or slowing down.
In our preview session, we played through multiple rounds in the Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party stage – a forest-themed stage featuring a moveable Wiggler (you ring a bell to have him change positions), requiring players to chart various paths filled with mushrooms, rocks, and flowers.
Wiggler changing up the stage pathways is neat, but it is a relatively simple course. The fun, as with most Mario Party games, is in the chaos of attempting to buy stars while paths constantly shift, new items give select players an advantage, and wild mini-games pop up along the way.
It all went wrong at the start, which is how the best games of Mario Party go. When the star was delivered in our game, it was around 15 places from the starting marker – and so, of course, everyone ran to it by taking the left pathway. But by the time the first person reached the star, we’d only had one mini-game, and they couldn’t actually afford it.
The second person passed, and then the third. Nobody could afford the star. So, we all ended up in a mad dash to run around Wiggler, tripping over our own feet to make it back to the beginning, 20 coins finally earned across a range of activities and special events.
Along the way, there was plenty of randomness that shot folks ample spaces ahead – and plenty of dangers that removed that advantage. The star shifted place. Special vendors littered along the board offered to pinch stars from other players (nobody had stars), and at shops, players purchased an array of special dice to push themselves forward.
In true Mario Party fashion, our Jamboree session ended with one player approaching 100 coins, one player on around 40, and one player with zero. We had the full course of chaos: the player on 100 coins benefitted from a strong CPU partner in one mini-game, and then got lucky across multiple item drops, dice rolls, and stage shifts.
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At the end of the road, these results didn’t matter, really. Because what Super Mario Party Jamboree presented was an over-the-top, silly-good time buoyed by its chaos, and by its wonderful raft of new mini-games. Victory would’ve been sweet, but the true joy in Mario Party is in the ridiculous hoops you’re sent through in this quest.
Run, jump, swim to victory in Super Mario Party Jamboree
Running though Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party, our playing group encountered a range of memorable new mini-games. One of these requires players to wield a camera, and then seek out an exact scene within a 3D world, and take a snap that matches a provided shot. It’s snappy (literally) and incredible fun, even as you’re panicking over where the exact right Toad is being threatened by a Chain Chomp.
Another mini-game saw players attempting to avoiding deadly falling sandwiches in a picnic basket, with victory only assured by those who understood the perception depth of the game. Those sandwiches fall fast, and they are terrifying.
A personal favourite of our session was the triathlon mini-game, which requires players to swim, bike, and hurdle their way to victory by holding the Joy-Con controllers in a variety of weird, awkward ways – rolling shoulders, twisting the controller, and leaping at just the right moment. The frustrated laughter in this game was well-earned, as it’s a fun and funny little addition that adds to this game’s easy, breezy sense of joy.
It’s hard to say that Super Mario Party Jamboree does anything differently to its predecessors, based on this brief gameplay snippet. What it seems to do is go bigger and better, building on what came before with returning and new stages, over a hundred mini-games, more playable characters, more items, and more chances for chaos.
The reality is Nintendo has long perfected the Mario Party formula. There’s not much more room to grow. And in doubling down on everything that already works, while providing ample new scope for multiplayer (or solo) hilarity, Jamboree looks set to build on the franchise’s legacy.
If you love Mario Party already, or you’re just looking for a new multiplayer game to enjoy with friends, you’ll certainly be enthralled by what this title has to offer. We could all do with more silly joy in our lives, and Jamboree is enthusiastic about providing it.
Super Mario Party Jamboree is set to launch for Nintendo Switch on 17 October 2024.
