Mario Strikers makes a comeback for the Switch with a more simplified version that is ultimately less enjoyable to play.
Because of the wild pleasure I had with Mario Strikers Charged, the Wii version of Mario’s supercharged football series that debuted an astounding 15 years ago, I had been anticipating Mario Strikers: Battle League Football. The first update to Strikers since then is Battle League, which launches this week for Switch (without the Football outside of Europe). However, the more I played, the fewer things I could find enjoyable.
In the end, Battle League is perhaps a better portrayal of small-team football since it is a more concentrated game. Aside from the sporadic hiccups in frame rate, it presents itself more elegantly and has the most amount of visual customization in the series to yet. That being said, I don’t really play Rocket League or Mario Strikers for football purposes. I used to play Strikers on the Wii, since it was a peculiar and extremely Mario-esque take on football. It seems like there is less of that this time around, which is bad news for Battle League.
The main features of the game are Cup Battles, which are a sequence of mini tournament brackets in which four players can advance and earn coins that unlock customizations, and Strikers Club, an online mode in which your wins go toward a weekly seasonal ranking for groups of up to 20 people that resemble Clash of Clans. The founder of your club can modify the appearance of each member’s favorite pitch at the conclusion of each week using the tokens they have earned.
Cup battles are really exciting, but they yield a significantly less amount of cash when each cup has been defeated. This money is required to buy equip upgrades that let you customize Battle League’s initial cast of ten Mushroom Kingdom characters. As usual, Mario is your all-around player, Bowser is muscular but slower, and Toad—making his fully playable series debut—is quick but prone to getting knocked out.
In addition to giving these characters more realistic armor that is more NFL than Premier League, gear may also be utilized to fill in the blanks in some metrics and balance things out so that, if you’d like, your Toad can really carry a punch. But everything has a cost; for example, strength skill points cost speed; so, you don’t actually improve a character per se, but rather modify their gameplay.
At the start of a match, you select which four main characters to control (the goalie is still a CPU and there are no Sidekicks this time around), as well as whether to equip them with gear or not. Next, players will have a limited option of five stadiums to chose from, each with a different theme: Peach’s Castle, Bowser’s Castle, Luigi’s Mansion, Donkey Kong’s jungle, or a Mushroom Hill that resembles a theme park version of Super Mario. Here, your completely aesthetic choice is combined with that of your opponents to form a stadium that is divided in half. Sadly, this means that the stadium effects from Charged are no longer an issue. The days of a cow being blown across the field to obstruct play in the middle of a hurricane at a windy stadium are long gone.
The actual gameplay seems more tactical, with a set of maneuvers that you are first taught through an extensive set of tutorials. Knowing when to employ each of the two distinct talents of dashing and evading is essential to preventing the constant tackling that is currently a main focus. In order to get control of the ball or eliminate other players before they can, you spend a lot of time sliding or crashing into opponents. This is because you have fewer and weaker equipment than Charged and no Super Abilities. Even while it’s funny to see Yoshi get sprayed all over the stadium walls, there are times when tackling becomes too intense, especially when players appear to writhe on the floor for a bit longer than is required. This is particularly noticeable when your goalie is trying to get the ball back into play while you’re waiting for a Hyper Strike to finish. When play really restarts, some battles might degenerate into an annoying full-on brawl in which nobody is left standing.
The reduction of equipment in Battle League to those that are akin to those in Mario Kart and the elimination of Charged’s Super Abilities, which were unique to each character, do not help the problem. The Hyper Strike ability, which is triggered by a luminous ball akin to Super Smash Bros.’ Smash Ball, presently only provides an alternate animation based on the character using it. It’s not the same as really being in control of Mario when he becomes enormous, Yoshi when he squashes players within a gigantic egg, or Wario when he releases a powdered fart to confound surrounding adversaries. After the increased focus on passing the ball among team members in Charged, with its metallic ball that heated up over time, even successful passing times felt less significant.
And at least until debut, that is how Battle League is. This Strikers game has a lot of personality; every now and then I’ll laugh when I see Wario resolutely holding the football under his arm like the huge cheat he is, or when I witness another celebration dance from the extremely strange Waluigi. It is really rewarding to be able to execute a Hyper Strike just as your opponent is sliding in to stop you. Additionally, there are already hints that the game will have a list of post-launch upgrades including other characters. However, even with these, and even if the weekly Strikers Club ends up becoming popular, it’s difficult to compare the limited number of modes available at the moment to Rocket League, that other football game that isn’t about football, and then take into account Nintendo’s standard boxed Switch game RRP and still be able to recommend Battle League for a quick kickabout.