Mario Golf: Super Rush Review

Golf isn’t exactly the sexiest sport around at the best of times and its appeal while broadened thanks to the likes of one Tiger Woods is still narrow compared to other higher profile sports. That hasn’t stopped Nintendo from slipping the mustached plumber and his friends into a pair of soft cleats and handing them a bag of clubs in the past, and with the last Mario Golf having been World Tour for the 3DS back in 2014 it was about time to have the crew back out there hacking divots in 2021. Really though, the Gamecube’s Toadstool Tour in 2003 is probably the installment most fans old enough to have played it would point to it being the game to live up to, so how does Mario Golf: Super Rush hold up against it and those that came before? I can tell you it doesn’t exactly live up to the lofty expectations the amazing starting screen sets – that’s for sure.

Super Rush consists of five modes, most of which are playable solo or with others in either local play or online. Standard Golf is exactly what it sounds like, Speed Golf is standard golf but with the added expectation of finishing as fast as possible, Solo Challenge lets you try and get the lowest score and fastest time on any of the six courses, Battle Golf is an arena-style mode that centers around a first to three format, and Golf Adventure is the single player campaign of sorts that you take your Mii character through and level them up for use in other modes once completed.

While the titular mechanic of speed golf is meant to be the focus, the more ubiquitous mechanic is the special shot. Every character has their own stat sheet, and Mii characters can further be refined with club selection, but everyone also has a special shot. These shots are usable after filling the special shot meter either by playing well or collecting coins when possible. They can do all sorts of things to better your position and/or mess with the other players’ positions. From bombing the landing zone and pushing all the balls away from the blast zone to turning the balls into an egg for the next shot, a match can really be upended when they’re used at the right time. Not all special shots are created equal, however, and mostly the aforementioned bomb shot and the morphing shots of Yoshi and Rosalina are the most potent, with the others not quite being as effective. That’s not to say the others can’t ruin someone’s day, but they’re harder to use effectively.

All of Super Rush’s unique mechanics come together most aptly in the Battle Golf mode, which really does remind me of the Mario Kart Battle mode but with a golf club in hand instead of a gas pedal underfoot. Placing you and your opponents in an arena, it’s a race to sink your ball in three holes first. It’s not that easy, of course, as when anyone finishes a hole it is no longer available for anyone else. Mixing things up further you can use items found around the arena to disrupt your opponents like bob-ombs or use a special shot to electrocute them as they try their best to set up their next swing. Obstacles abound as well, with dangers like Thwomps looking to ruin your day and Chain-Chomps trying to take a bite out of you on the way to the green. It’s complete chaos, but can often be over quite quickly, so your chances of making a comeback when down are slim. All the same, it’s likely to be one of the favoured modes for when friends get together and want to decide how many of them will be disowned before the end of the month.

Golf Adventure is the place to both hone your skills and build your Mii character for use in other modes and takes you on a journey from a lowly golf novice to…lighting and fire-wielding saviour of at least two golf courses that were under the control of…a Dollar Store clearance sale Moltres, and an evil Snowman. Truly, at some point in the development of the Golf Adventure mode, some quantity of bath salts had to have been taken because it goes off the rails faster than most Roller Coaster Tycoon custom jobs and never gets back on. Starting out it’s everything you’d expect, providing you with the basic knowledge of each of the game’s mechanics before putting them to use in a tournament, but at some point, it just derails itself and pitches an absolute gong show of a story that does just enough to justify Mario showing up for 14 seconds of camera time.

I was really disappointed with the Golf Adventure mode, to be honest. With so many great golfing modes, such a great cast of characters, and such a variety of play, Super Rush had all the opportunity in the world to craft a truly wonderful story mode. Having proper cups like Mario Kart at the bare minimum would have been the obvious yet still more thoughtful play here. Playing through a story mode with different characters resulting in different rivals would have also been a cool idea that other golf games have implemented in the past and would have added more replayability and depth to the mode as well. Instead, it’s simply a bare-bones vehicle for a haphazardly presented tutorial and Mii character creator before diving off the deep end.

The weird story portion aside, Golf Adventure does a reasonable job of showing you the ropes. Oddly, sometimes they have you using mechanics before placing you in front of the trainer NPC for those mechanics but thankfully there is a guide you can access at any time that should help bridge these gaps. Super Rush lets you choose between button controls or motion controls for your swing, with the button controls being a two-press system. Beyond simply setting your swing power, Super Rush’s shots are affected by a great number of things from your ball’s lie to the wind and weather. It’s very much a well-rounded golfing experience in this regard, and while the physics aren’t particularly reliable compared to the more serious golf games on the market, it does add a lot to the shot-to-shot experience. To combat the elements, you can also add a draw or fade to your shot as well as ball spin, the degree to which you can do so is determined by your stats of course. It was interesting to see them opt out of a 3 button press system which has been a mainstay in many golf games before. I think it would have been a better choice if only that it would add another layer of skill to the game. Having the ball follow its player-set trajectory based on the character’s stats and the ball’s lie does of course lend itself to the speed of the game but it also indirectly makes the online play more palatable, which we’ll get to later.

As you progress in Golf Aventure and gain experience points you can use them to level up your Mii’s stats, though the game does curb your attempts at min-maxing too early by offsetting other stats when one gets too far ahead. You’ll also earn coins to use at the pro shops at the various courses to buy specialty clubs and outfits that give perks you might want based on where you’ll be golfing next like shoes that reduce the speed reduction of running through rough for example. Golf Adventure is also the only place you can experience the cross-country (XC) golf mode.

XC golf places you on a course and tasks you with completing a certain number of holes in a set number of strokes, but the order in which you complete the holes is up to you. This mode happens on one course specifically and features tiered elevations with tornados that you can use to move you and your ball between the levels, as well as other obstacles and traps you’d normally see on the course. It’s a neat idea, but the tornados don’t always work as intended and one or two shots that go awry can ruin your chances of being successful and will force you to start all over. With a little more refinement, I think that XC golf would have been a great addition for multiplayer and easily applicable to all of the courses but unfortunately, that’s not the case.

It could have used the extra mode, too. While Super Rush boasts a solid variety of golf, there are only six courses to play on and so more varied use for each of those courses would have gone a long way. Sadly, this isn’t Super Rush’s biggest problem – that dubious honour goes to the game’s online multiplayer. Look, we all know that Nintendo hasn’t given a damn about online anything ever, but if you’re like me you foolishly hold on to the hope that one day they’ll wake up and stop living in the mid-90s. Super Rush’s online play is awful in just about every way. You can only bring one other local player with you to a lobby with lobbies maxing out at 4 players, finding a game takes way too many button clicks to get going, and connection issues or room fill times block you from getting into most games reliably. When you do miraculously get into a game, lag is abundant the majority of the time. This becomes a bigger issue when trying to set up your shots as pressing A to start your swing doesn’t always work when lag is present, and when you press it a second time you sometimes notice the first press was buffered and you just hit your ball without intending to. Even worse, the majority of matches I played resulted in a connection dropout by the host which ended the lobby and booted everyone from the match.

This is a pretty major issue, and not just because it’s 2021 and I had more stable connections playing Mario Party 64 with people in three countries spanning two continents on an emulator in 2013. Super Rush really doesn’t have a lot of content to keep the good times going offline unless you have friends over frequently enough to make use of local play, and as much as local play is always appreciated the reality is that for games like this most multiplayer is going to happen online. In fairness, I didn’t get a chance to test this online with a private lobby because nobody else I know was crazy enough to blindly spend full price on a Mario Golf game before knowing if it was worth the buy, but I suspect there’s a good chance it’s not a consistent performer without playing your next-door neighbour.

That unpolished experience online is present throughout Super Rush. Visually, even for a Switch game, it’s rough to look at and might be rendering internally at 480p. The overworld in the adventure mode feels barren most of the time, but more annoyingly every character uses one of maybe three voiced sounds for every line of dialogue. It seems like they just pulled assets out of a Mario Party game and built a golf game on top of it without giving it much more personality beyond that. The idea of speed golf and special shots is amazing, but they’re so awkwardly applied across modes that it feels like they didn’t quite think it all the way through aside from sort of figuring it out for one mode and assuming it would work everywhere equally as well when it doesn’t. The music is good, albeit your usual remix of various Mario themes, but that’s about all I could say positively about the presentation. The aforementioned lack of real offline content leaves it feeling stark and more of an afterthought than a properly polished Mario-branded game. Can you have fun with it? Yeah, sure you can, but I doubt for very long before it becomes an audible for far superior multiplayer games in Nintendo’s library. Value for the dollar is not something that Nintendo always strives for, and this seems to be one of those cases where they’re just charging full price because they can and not because it’s worthy of it.

What Mario Golf: Super Rush provides for that price of entry is not awful – it’s just not great, or oftentimes even good. While it is unique and you can fine-tune modes to get all sorts of combinations of play styles to suit your likes, with only six courses that only gets you so far. While local play is available, most multiplayer is done online, and that experience is categorically awful in ways that are even bad by Nintendo standards. Golf Adventure is a messy and uninspired mode with an identity crisis, albeit a serviceable way to build a Mii golfer while learning the mechanics, and the whole presentation is weak and lacks polish as much as the other areas do. If you’re really desperate to get your hands on a new Mario Golf and have no other way to play it with your friends but online, Super Rush might be for you. For everyone else, the grass is likely greener on just about any other fairway.