Late To The Party: Mario Party Star Rush’s Overdue Reinvention

With a videogaming career spanning over three decades of videogames, Mario is no stranger to reinventing himself. Yet despite this, the Mario Party games have oft been criticised for remaining too firmly rooted in the past. While Mario turns his hand to professional tennis, kart racing, and protecting the Mushroom Kingdom from Bowser’s latest dastardly plans, he’s fallen into a rut on his time off. Mario Party Star Rush changes all that, successfully refreshing and reinvigorating what had become a staid and uninspiring side to the franchise.

Coming to the Nintendo 3DS in November, there’s two fundamental changes to the core gameplay. First and foremost, when you’re playing in multiplayer you no longer take turns one at a time, but everyone rolls their die and makes their moves at the same time. From only having intermittent interactions with the game, as in Mario Party 10, you’re engaged with what’s going on throughout.

But Star Rush goes beyond that, because you’re no longer restricted to rolling your die and moving along the predetermined layout of the board. Instead, you’re free to move around a grid-based map however you see fit, finding your own path through the level and deciding what you want to try and achieve. Do you try to beef up your character by landing on power up blocks? Or do you try and get the advantage in the boss fight minigame by getting there first?

The game’s signature new mode is called Toad Scramble, with all players represented by different coloured Toads, instead of the leading characters from the Mario world. However, all of those characters do appear, springing up in randomised places around the map and ready to be recruited to your team, if you reach them first.

They’re actually a big advantage, with each additional character rolling a die to add up to three extra squares to you move. Alternatively, switch so that they are the leading character and make use of their special dice. Mario’s features 0 and 7 instead of 1 and 6, Peach is a pretty safe bet, thanks to having three 4s on her die, or you can risk it for a banana flavoured biscuit with Donkey Kong, who has two 10s and four 0s on his die. Of course, there’s a glimmer of mischievous delight if you manage to roll a 10, combine this with a pick up to add a few extra spaces, and have other characters adding to your range. In one go I was able to move from one side of the board to the other!

That can be a big advantage, because stars are now guarded by bosses on a map, and being able to land exactly on that square before anyone else can give you a small headstart, while everyone else has to mash buttons to get from wherever they are on the map to you. That grid-based map gives you a fair few more options on how to go about trying to win.

Of course, a lot of it’s going to hinge upon how well you do in the many minigames that are stuffed into Star Rush – if one thing has stayed the same, it’s that there’s minigames! You might be trying to steal apples from Goombas, load bombs into cannons to shoot at the Bob-omb King, even facing off against Bowser himself, but there’s also plenty of minigames for duelling against other players and stoking the fires of little rivalries. Again, those Mushroom Kingdom characters that you picked up can help you out at times, with the AI trying to dimly complete the objective alongside you.

Sadly, this is a game that I feel is going to be hampered by being on the 3DS. A Mario Party on Wii U could adopt the grid-based levels, certainly, but would have to lose the ability to take simultaneous turns, because Star Rush is so dependent on having each player with a console in hand – thankfully it features Download Play, so you only need one copy of the game. That’s going to be quite a rare situation for a lot of people, and that’s a shame, because this looks like it could be the best Mario Party in quite some time.