"A fine title for footie fans and Mario lovers alike"

INTRO

When the gaming industry takes two popular concepts and smashes them together into a game, what you get is usually a nice idea surrounded b a pile of wreckage. Mario Smash Football neatly sidesteps this by heavily changing both of its sources in their in-game depictions. What threatened to be a horrible Mario game or terrible football game has become something that's not quite either, which works surprisingly well.

GRAPHICS 7.5/10

Standard is all I can say here. The stadiums all look different (but none of them act different), the character models are well rounded and look good, and the animation is smooth and fluid, but what I have noticed is that it does tend to slow down occasionally, mostly on Bowser Stadium. However, the crowds look totally terrible, appearing as a selection of sprites that move up and down. Yep, that's it. It's a shame, really, but there you go.

SOUND 8/10

Sound effects: awesome. You can really feel the impact of the crunches coming out of your speakers, and the classic repertoire of Nintendo screams are in full swing here, from Mario's 'WHAAH-haa-hoo-hoo' to Peach's quiet 'Uuph'. The crowd may not have been good graphically, but their cheers on goals being scored are thoroughly realistic. The music is generally good, having a feel of proper chants to it, but it's fairly unrecognisable.

GAMEPLAY 10/10

Aaaaahhh... this game is truly brilliant to play. The controls are simple and tactics are simpler, but the epic scale of things with shells, bombs and Chain-Chomps being flung around on the five-a-side pitch is great fun. The element of luck in the game makes every game different, with the possible two-goal Super Strike constantly fought for. This is achieved by holding the shoot button (B) down long enough for a meter to appear, which you have to stop in a certain small area to grab the double goal. A couple of nice departures from football are the lack of a ref, so headbutting into an electric fence is allowed (no Zidane, though). The other is the fact that the ball can't leave the field except in goals, protected by the aforementioned electric fence. Not exactly football, then.

Characters: There are 9 captains, such as Daisy, Yoshi and DK (though Bowser is unplayable as a captain) and four different sidekicks you can have to flesh out the rest of the team. My one gripe here is that almost all the characters behave identically, with the same speed and shooting abilities.

CONCLUSION

Get it if you like football or violence. Liking Mario is not necessary, but it helps. Just don't try the stuff you can do in this in your Sunday match.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/07

Game Release: Mario Smash Football (EU, 11/18/05)