Mario Strikers Charged

"Is this Nintendo's golden goal or is it their second yellow card?"

Football, one of Earth's most loved sports. Is this game worth your cash when you can watch it for free on Sky sports, or play it for free in your back garden with your mates? The answer, yes, this game is compulsory in any Wii game collection. So, what's this game got to offer? It has 4 extra characters over the last game, 10 new stadiums, 4 new sidekicks, bringing us to a grand total of 12 characters, each with their own, unique abilities, 17 stadiums, each with a surprise trait, 8 sidekicks, also with their own abilities. And not forgetting the almighty Megastrike, a way of scoring up to 6 goals with one kick!
The game is pretty basic, unless you've been living under a rock for years, you should know the basic rules, a net at each end, kick the ball into said net, score goals, gloat at the other team. But hang on, this is Mario, it surely can't be that boring. If you thought that, you'd be correct. Nintendo have stripped the game of a referee, so that means you can hit people round the head as much as you like. As their next trick, they have introduced items, every time you get clobbered round the head, or perform a cracking shot at goal, you will receive an item, these will range from banana skins, for tripping up the opponents, to ice shells, for freezing them. Then there are the abilities, which differ from character to character. Mario's "Super Mario" will allow him to grow large and invincible to everything but items. Yoshi's "Egg roll" will allow him to turn into a massive egg and roll over the other teams members, and Wario's "Gas mask" which, followed with a rather nasty comment such as "Spicy" or "Juicy", will leave the opponents feel a rather ill (and you too, most likely).

Single player in this game is probably one of the hardest parts of any Mario sports game I've ever played, it is the only reason that this review isn't a 10 of 10. It starts off simple enough for you to get the basic controls down, then, after you win the Fire cup, you're plunged straight in at the deep end for the Crystal and Striker cups. Each cup will have 4, 6 and 10 people respectively, and in all but the latter, you will play all opponents twice. 10 people would obviously take too long to play twice, so you only play them a single time. After that, the bottom two players in the league are dropped out and everyone else is placed in a knockout championship. The winner of this will play the cup champion in a best of three matches game, win this and you win the cup. Anyway, I was saying how hard the game was, the most skilled of you will likely defeat the crystal cup, no problem at all, but even the best of the best will have trouble at the striker cup. The opponents are merciless, they perform a perfect Megastrike whenever they have the chance, knock you out the way if you even come close to the ball and make the most out of every spare nanosecond they have. Anyone who can complete this should be very, very proud of themselves.

Now, we go to online. The online in this game is better than any DS game I have played online at the time of writing. One section which has been notably improved is the friends system, although you still have to input your friend codes, you no longer have to both go on friends mode to play them. The wii will say if they are online, once you set up a match, you can select any of your online friends to play with, as long as they aren't already in a game. The options are just like a normal domination mode match with all the same option screens, you can even implement the cheats that you have unlocked. There is also a point system in normal, unranked online play, 10 points for a win, 1 point for a loss, and a point for every goal you score. Every Monday at 1am, the wins, losses and points are reset to 0, so even if you've been away for a week, you won't have lost any possibility of being number 1 at the charts!

In conclusion, I must give you a word of advice before you purchase this game. Make sure you have a lot of free time when playing this game, it's very, very addictive. In fact, it's worth buying a Wii just for this game. If you receive £40 this week, use it on this game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/29/07