Mario Strikers Charged

"A blast of a Mario sports title, but hampered by serious flaws"

I've never been a fan of Mario's ever-increasing library of sports games, the appeal was always kind of lost on me. This even held true for GameCube's Super Mario Strikers title, which came off as only mildly interesting with it's demo. Strikers Charged seemed to have added enough improvements to warrant a closer look, however, and I went ahead and bought it as my first Wii title. Altogether, it was worth the purchase.

Strikers Charged is a twisted version of real-life soccer / international football, letting you create a team of four characters to compete against another team to score goals in a fairly cramped field. Your team consists of the captain (a main Mario character) as well as three sidekicks, which are generic enemies and good guys from the Mario series like Shy Guys and Toads. All characters have their own unique stats and a special ability when they are in possession of the ball, while the sidekicks have a unique special shot and captains all have a variation of the same type of ultra special shot. To make up for this, captains also have a unique item that activates a special ability only they can use.

Matches usually have a short 3-5 minute timer, or first to so many goals objective. A key aspect of matches is the "soccer ball" itself, which gets charged up as it is passed or manually charged by a character. As it is charged it gets faster, and becomes more deadly should it be shot for a goal. By manually charging the ball it can also be charged up to the point that a special shot can be made, which for sidekicks is usually an uber shot that either incapacitates opposing players/goalies or is just a flat out unblockable shot, and for captains is an uber shot that releases 3-6 balls at once that all have to be blocked by the goalie.

Besides scoring, there aren't any real "rules" to the game. The edge of the arena is an electric fence/energy shield, and characters are allowed to tackle eachother as much as they want. To offset the lack of fouls or yellow cards, if you tackle an opponent without the ball his team stands a good chance at getting an item, which are also earned by making a charged shot. If you've played a Mario spin-off title you know what the gist of these are, multiple shell types that knock characters out, explosive bob-ombs, speed boosts, temporary invincibility, and a Chain Chomp that causes untold mayhem.

Factoring in unique stage hazards as well, the action is rather crazy and takes some getting used to. Even if you're accustomed to the nonstop tackling, shells and uber shots, the action frequently gets too crazy for any serious accomplishments to be made by either side - often in the last 45 seconds of a match, when it is most critical. It isn't a particularly big deal however, and all of the action-ey aspects lend a good deal more thought to the game, instead of just pass, pass, shoot all the time.

The presentation is where Strikers Charged really hurts. The whole game has that feeling of being injected with Mountain Dew, trying too hard to be extreme. You can probably get past the characters randomly diving in right out of the sky for every single match, or that the Mega Strikes overkill their attempts to be "cool." What is hard to get past is that every single match is presented like a real game, with animations, replays and commentary/statistics breaking up the action. It is cute the first few games but then it gets repetitive and just becomes dozens (yes, DOZENS) of scenes for you to skip through every time you play. WHY is there not an option to turn this off and just let me PLAY the game? It gets worse when trying to train and improve against the computer (that is, dozens of practice games), as the repetitive, obnoxious taunts and the game telling you how badly you got beaten will quickly work on any gamer's nerves. Truth be told, several times I just turned the game off in disgust, it got that obnoxious.

The sound and music is all standard stuff, nothing to complain about. The music is action-packed and does it's job of getting you pumped up, while the sound effects are fittingly chaotic. The voice acting is all pretty good, with plenty of humorous taunts/remarks by characters in the middle of the game.

Visually it is quite attractive, nothing mind-blowing but quite nice to look at. The victory/losing animations range from outright hilarious to "meh" to stupid crap, but they all get kind of repetitive before too long. Stages are quite detailed, with a large animated audience on the outskirts that helps the atmosphere along.

There aren't a whole lot of features here. The "campaign/story" mode wears on your nerves fairly quickly, forcing you to play a crapload of matches in each cup before moving on to the eliminations and then the final match - and if you lose at either of those you go all the way back to the beginning. The challenge is pretty gruesome past the first cup as well, and considering the mild rewards for playing it I wouldn't put it past most players to quit once in the second cup.

Matches don't offer a ton of variety either. You can play a timed match or a "First to X Goals" match and can choose from a number of stages. All of the past stages just seem to be the same thing, while a number of the new stages have their own interesting twists and turns. Unfortunately, several of them involve severely impeding character movement, which is more obnoxious than anything else. Doing special challenges you can unlock a number of "cheats" in the game as well, which also help replayability a bit by letting you alter the rules of the game.

The multi-player is where the game really shines, letting up to four players join in the game and be arranged between the two teams however they like. Co-op or versus, it is a very entertaining way to kill some hours with friends, a major improvement over just facing off against the computer all the time. My connection wasn't ever good enough to get a Wi-Fi game going, but from what I've heard it is solid as well.

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SCORES
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Gameplay - 7.5/10
The core game is very good, but hampered by an overabundance of scenes during matches, questionable partner AI, and slight lack in features. Modes in single player a bit lame, but adding in more players helps the fun tremendously.

Graphics - 8.5/10
Pretty, not much else to say.

Audio - 9/10
Solid soundtrack, sound effects during game do their job, humorous voice acting during matches.

Controls - 8/10
Take a bit of getting used to, but work well with practice. Motion sensing controls feel too tacked on and out of place, though.

Replayability - 8/10
With some friends you can have a lot of fun. Playing by yourself you'll unlock most of the content and scoff at the few unlockables remaining that are ridiculously challenging within the first four or five days. After that you'll probably intermittently return for a few games at a time.

Ultimately, Mario Strikers Charged was a successful game for Nintendo. For the most part, everything from the first game was improved upon and the final experience is pretty enjoyable. There is still plenty of work that can be done with the series though, and they probably need to rethink some of their design decisions with it. Charged is sitll recommendable though, and makes a very good title to play with a friend or in a party environment.

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

Game Release: Mario Strikers Charged (US, 07/30/07)