Game Review: Mario Strikers: Battle League (2022)
Credit: Nintendo
“I want to preface this review by saying I was very excited to play this game. I love Mario and I love the beautiful game (aka soccer aka football). But when Nintendo charges its customers $60 for very little game, it can make things ugly. ”
How did we get here?
Way back in 2005, Nintendo partnered with Next Level Games to bring Mario fans the original Super Mario Strikers, exclusively for the GameCube. Super Mario Strikers provided fans with the ability to play as eight different captain characters from the Mario catalog, supported by a team of three sidekicks of Toads, Hammer Bros, Birdos, or Koopas, and Kitter the crocodile as the goalie. Two years later, Mario Strikers Charged would release for the Nintendo Wii on May 25, 2007. This game was also developed by Next Level Games, this time featuring twelve different captain characters, as well as eight different sidekicks, and now the ability to utilize items to terrorize your opponents. Despite Metacritic scores for both games hovering around a respectable 80%, it would take another fourteen years before Nintendo tapped Next Level Games to develop Mario Strikers: Battle League (“Battle League”).
Mario Strikers: Battle League was released on June 10, 2022, worldwide. The game is a Nintendo Switch exclusive, priced at $60.00 at launch. No deluxe or collector’s versions of the game were released, and as of the writing of this review, there is no purchasable DLC. But Nintendo has confirmed on Twitter that free DLC is on the way, which will provide several new characters to the game’s roster
What is Mario Strikers: Battle League?
Gameplay in Mario Strikers consists of a 5v5 indoor soccer style sports game that puts you in the cleats of several of your favorite Mario characters. You get to choose from 10 different characters to fill out the four players you will control, and the goalie is always Boom Boom (who some may recognize from Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990) as well as Super Mario 3D Land (2011).)
You can choose from Princesses Peach and Rosalie, Mario, Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, Bowser, Donkey Kong, Toad, and Yoshi. Notably absent from the previous games are the sidekicks: Koopa Troopa, Dry Bones, Birdo, Boo, Hammer Bros, Monty Mole, and Shy Guy. Not to mention main playable characters Daisy, Petey Piranha, Bowser Jr., and Diddy Kong. As of the time of writing this review, Mario Strikers: Battle League does not have any unlockable characters, but as referenced above, free DLC has been announced.
Game Modes
You start out the game with a very boring tutorial. Having never played a Mario Strikers game before, I wanted to familiarize myself with the controls and strategies, and played through several of the tutorials provided. The tutorial mode is fairly comprehensive, ranging from the basics of passing and shooting, to “Hyper Strikes” and advanced passing. The tutorial adequately prepares you for the rest of game.
After becoming familiarized with the controls, it's time to hit the pitch. Your options include Quick Battle, where you can play against the CPU or local multiplayer with up to eight players on a single console; local wireless (limited to two players), or single player online play. The next game mode is Cup Battles, wherein you compete in double-elimination tournaments to collect trophies and coins. Finally, the meat of the game is Strikers Club, the online multiplayer which takes a page from FIFA's playbook and encourages forming clubs and participating in seasons to compete for coins to customize your club’s stadium, goal, and field designs.
Other than what's provided above, that's the game. There is the option to spend your hard earned coins on power ups for your characters which provide a cosmetic change as well as a boost to particular stats, but this is largely uneventful since the rest of the game is so devoid of much to do. Sure you can dress up your character, but aside from the minimal stat boosts, there isn't much else to set your characters apart.
Gameplay
Despite the lack of game modes, this is not to say that gameplay isn't fun. Aside from the A.I. for the goalkeepers being very hit or miss and ultimately uncontrollable, playing a match can be very exciting. The passing, slide tackling and shooting are all very responsive and engaging. The games can get intense as you do your best to collect items to disrupt your opponents, defend your net, and attack the goal. There are systems for the player to learn such as perfect passes and perfect shots which provide your players a boost of speed and better chance of scoring, respectively. It is important to know when to slide someone, and there is some thought given to the difference in size between characters as some won’t have as easy a time taking down their opponents if the size discrepancies are too large.
But all of this game’s shine comes from the gameplay which admittedly is fast-paced and at times technical, but this shine quickly tarnishes as you come to realize that all you can do is play regular matches. Customization options for matches are limited to match length, toggling items on/off, CPU difficulty, and toggling Hyper Strikes on/off. Furthermore, the gameplay doesn’t appear to have evolved very far from what was provided in Mario Strikers Charged, back in 2007. Next Level Games definitely didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel when it developed Battle League. Although gameplay can be fun, this isn't enough to make this one worth picking up when the bulk of this soccer game is very hollow. Which raises another major issue for me personally, this is supposed to be a soccer game.
Can You Really Call This a Soccer Game?
A major issue I have with Mario Strikers is the fact that Nintendo's own synopsis of the game describes it as, "a 5-on-5, soccer-like sport with no rules!" Anyone who has played any game, or watched any movie, knows that when there are established rules being broken without explanation, it makes the game much less fun. Australian children’s show Bluey, makes this point very clear in the episode, “Shadowlands”, wherein the titular character explains to her friend that you can’t change the rules to the game, because it wouldn’t be proper. The moral of this episode is, “you can’t change the rules because the rules make it fun!”
Mario Strikers takes a lot of liberties when it calls itself a "soccer-like" game. For one, any soccer player starting at the age of 5 knows that soccer cleats do not have a front spike. I can distinctly remember my parents saving money by purchasing me baseball cleats for the summer, and then when soccer season was starting up, cut off that front cleat with a blade to make them regulation. This front cleat, that is present on both American football and baseball cleats, is not present on soccer cleats because it interferes with a player’s handling of the ball. Mario Strikers specifically modeled each of its characters with this front cleat. The question I have is, why? Interestingly, several of the character models from Mario Strikers Charged actually leave off the front cleat, but every character in Battle League specifically includes it.
Second, the fact there is no flow or follow-through when shooting. You cannot shoot on the run. When preparing to shoot, your character plants their feet and powers up their shot. This does two things: (1) this is nothing like the kicking motion from playing soccer; and (2) it leaves the player completely vulnerable to attack. If you want to let loose your character's "Hyper Strike" (an animated powered up shot plus quick time event [“QTE”]) you have to hold the shot button until completely full, and then take the time to stop an indicator in the proper portions of the shot meter, and then watch a cutscene of your character juggle the ball in some character specific manner, and fire it at the keeper, causing a QTE to trigger for the defending goalie. This is notably the only time you can factor into defending the goal as the goalie. But the issue is, this disrupts the flow of your movement, and makes shooting feel very disjointed. One simple, but unincluded quality of life feature would be being able to turn off the animations for the cutscenes for the Hyper Strikes which quickly played out after several matches.
Lastly, the first rule any child learns in soccer is that YOU DO NOT TOUCH THE BALL WITH YOUR HANDS! Several of the characters' Hyper Strikes include animations where they directly pick up the ball with their hands. Bowser, for example, picks up the ball, breathes fire on it, and throws it at the goal. Why not just kick it?! In fact, Wario himself will literally carry the ball in his hands at times just because. This completely removes any immersion I might've had when playing the game.
Final Verdict
When games like EA's Star Wars: Squadrons (2020) was released for just $40 at launch, it's hard to justify purchasing a game that contains so much less than a $60 game should. Squadrons, like Battle League, was more so focused on online gameplay, but it also contained a full story mode and a lot of different customization options and ships to unlock.
Maybe I’m just an old soccer player nitpicking a children's game, but don't call yourself a soccer (or even soccer-like) game and proceed to pick up the ball with your hands, have front spikes on your cleats, and take away the flow by forcing your player to stop moving to power up a shot. This game needs a lot to be considered worthy of the $60 price tag. Given the amount of content that was present on the old GameCube and Wii entries of this franchise that is totally absent in Battle League, it would take an adventure mode, fully customizable game modes, way more character customization options, re-tooled animations and character models, as well as a re-worked shooting system to make this game worth the money. I'm totally willing to revisit and regrade the game when the "free DLC" drops, but characters alone don’t constitute the content necessary to justify the $60 price tag. So until then…
Final Verdict: 5/10
