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Mario Strikers Charged for Nintendo Wii Videos >>
Rating Reviewed By Ovi(Expert) Review Date 10/31/2007 Overall Rating  1 of 5 Value Rating  5 of 5 Visitors rate this review 4.67 of 5, 3 votes Rate this review? Summary Whenever I first heard about Super Mario Strikers for the Gamecube, I thought it sounded like a cool game and all but never got the chance to play it. So the sequel is coming out for the Wii and I think to myself, "That's cool, I guess I'll give it a try and see what it's like". And so, a couple of months after it came out I bought it to see what all the hype was about.Unfortunately what I found left a lot to be desired. In Mario Strikers Charged you play fast-paced soccer as one of several characters from the Mushroom Kingdom and execute powerful 'Charge Shots' to score several points at once. Obstacles randomly dart across the field to cause trouble in renown Mario style, and some of them can be used as power-ups, such as the mushroom which makes you grow to enormous size and stomp over anyone in your path. Sounds like a cool idea, right? Yeah, it does sound that way, but there's a difference between fantasy and reality, and that couldn't be more clear here, folks. What we have here is, quite simply, a game with few redeeming qualities and little pay value. To begin with, there are only about a dozen characters that really matter in this game, classified as captains, who you will control almost 100% of the time during a game. Your other players are called 'sidekicks', which couldn't be more true because their chances of scoring a goal are, well, slim. Unless you choose Wario, all of the captains in this game are faster, stronger and all-around better than the sidekicks, meaning you'll only use the sidekicks to pass the ball to and perform steals and passes when the ball gets too far away from you. Captains are the only characters than can use charge shots, unfairly powerful goal-shots that cause a barrage of balls to careen into the net, which the other team's goalie must try to catch with their wii remote's pointer. Usually, one or two balls will inevitably swoop into your goal, and because performing charge shots is easy as pie, you will spend more time getting close to your opponents' net and scoring goals this way than actually using teamwork and giving everyone a chance to play. Obstacles, like the above mentioned mushroom, are pretty much unavoidable and almost as annoying as the charge shots. Waluigi, for some reason, seems to be able to score more shots on you than any other character. And your goalies - you can't pick them - they are always kremlings from the Donkey Kong Country games, always. But overall, the game is just boring. You buy this game expecting it to be fun and something you can whip out and play anytime, and it's not. Every time you put the game in the Wii you know exactly what to expect - a primitive side-view soccer game where your only purpose is to charge-shot for the win. Sure it has some nice parts - there is a sort of challenge mode you can play through to try and complete difficult tasks, and wi-fi play which I can't play, but on the whole that just isn't going to do much for a game that's about as fun as Pong. Somehow I think the game would actually be more fun if you only played as the sidekicks, since they each have obvious strengths and weaknesses and are fun to play as, but then the only ones I ever really use are the Hammer Bro. and Toad. The game's music, while much more 'urban' than the other tracks in their library, are not memorable, and the characters are so small on the screen (like little ants) that the action is de-magnified and made even more boring. There aren't any brilliant textures or effects here anyway, except for the cutscenes right before the characters perform their charge shots, which get boring fast. There's just so much sub-par about this game, I'm ashamed that Nintendo made it. I have more fun playing Mario Party 8, which isn't a bad game but leaves much to be desired in its own right. That said, this game is only for people who played the GCN version and liked that, I guess. Strength Wi-fi support, semi-large cast of playable characters, hypnotizing cut-scenes, challenging challenge modeWeakness Boring gameplay, rediculously unbalanced characters and charge shots, poor camera distance, awkward controls, annoying features and cutscenes, very sub-par gameWould you like to Comment? Join VideoGameReview for a free account, or Login if you are already a member.
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