I've played all the Mario Partys and it seems every generation, it gets worse. I watched all the trailers and some of the short gameplays for this game and it looked really good. Needless to say, I was disappointed, and bored after a few rounds.
Pros:
-Partner System is an interesting edition, especially when they can participate in minigames.
-Some neat random interactions
-Good character selection.
Cons:
-Boards are too small this caused an average a star gained by someone every other round, and it wasn't rare that with your partners, you could traverse nearly the entire board in one round.
-Only 4 small boards to choose from.
-Boards are very bland, undecorated compared to previous Mario party boards, and mostly uneventful.
-Some of the voices of the characters are butchered, what the heck did they do to boo and lakitu?!
-Stars are only 10 coins each.
-No competition. With stars given out like candy, there is little strategy involved.
-Not many diverse minigames, 95% of them are 4 player, there is less than a handful of the others (1v3 and 2v2).
-Most minigames seemed winnable with your eyes closed and a simple shake of the controller.
-Items in the game are fairly generic. Also, "Item shops" if you want to even call it that, only have three items.
-Points awarded from board and minigame play can be spent on...unlocking tutorials. Previous Mario Partys had unique items you could buy and put in a room to display.
-Limited to using one joycon - I'm a big guy, my hands are huge, I need to be able to use other controllers as well. I found myself hitting multiple buttons at once on accident frequently.
-Online is extremely limited and simply not even worth trying at this point.
-Can't play in handheld mode
The game feels incomplete and at best, a decent entry into a handheld Mario Party game, however, the Switch is also a console hybrid, so this feels out of place due to its lack of features. Even with future updates, this game needs some heavy revamping. This feels like the release of Bomberman R, which was a game released for the Switch that lacked a lot of basic features previous Bomberman games had--they're still trying to patch things up to bring it up to speed a year later!
These lazy releases cannot continue to go unnoticed. Hold your coins for Mario Party 12, or at least, a couple months when they (hopefully) release more features and the price goes down.
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