I’ve been looking forward to Mario Striker: Soccer League because I remember the chaotic fun with Mario Striker Stormtrooper, the incarnation of Mario’s enhanced football series, which launched 15 years ago on the Wii, amazingly. Coming to Switch this week, Battle League (excluding football outside of Europe) is the first new version of Strikers since then. But the more I play, the less I find that I used to like.
The Versus League is arguably a more focused game — and may end up being a better representation of squad football. Aside from occasional framerate fluctuations, it’s also rendered more fluidly and certainly has the most visual customization of the series to date. But I didn’t really play Mario Striker for football, just like I didn’t play Rocket League for football. I play Striker – or I used to play, back on the Wii – because it’s a weird and very Mario version of football. To the detriment of Battle League, it feels like a lot less this time around.
The game’s core offerings are its Cup Battles – a series of mini-tournament brackets in which up to four players can progress to earn custom unlocked coins – and Striker Club, an online mode where your victories contribute to the clan each week Clash offers seasonal rankings – style groups of up to 20 members. At the end of each week, the founders of your club can use the tokens earned by members to adjust the look of their preferred pitch.
Cup Battles are fun enough, although after each cup is defeated, the number of coins offered by these drops considerably. You’ll need this currency to buy gear upgrades to customize your opening choices for the Battle League’s 10 Mushroom Kingdom characters. As always, Mario is your all-rounder, Bowser is slower but strong, and Toad (in his fully playable debut for the series) is quick but easy to beat.
In addition to enhancing the design of these characters with armor that’s decidedly less football-like (more like the NFL than the Premier League), gear can also be used to fill in gaps in certain stats and smooth things out, so really, if you so eager.However, everything comes at a cost – for example, skill points in Strength come at the cost of speed – which means you’re not really upgrade A character on their own, but adjusted to the way they play.
The game starts with your choice of four main characters to control (no Sidekicks this time, the goalie is still the CPU), and whether to use gear or not. There are next five stadiums to choose from, themed around Peach Castle, Bowser’s Castle, Luigi’s Mansion, Donkey Kong Jungle, or Mushroom Hill that looks straight out of the real-world Super Mario theme park. Your choices here are purely aesthetic and mixed with your opponents to create a two-half stadium. Sadly, as a result of this, the stadium effect seen in Charged no longer exists. Gone are the days of a windy stadium where a cow could be seen being blown across the pitch in a hurricane that blocked play in a hurricane.
The game itself feels more tactical, with an initial introduction to a set of moves through a series of lengthy tutorials. Sprinting and dodging are their own separate skills, and knowing when to use them is key to avoiding constant tackles that would otherwise be the main focus right now. With less gear and weaker gear than the Charged, and no Super Abilities at all, you spend most of your time slamming or sliding your opponent to control the ball or preemptively knock out other players. But while it’s fun to see Yoshi keep splashing against the stadium walls, the focus on steals can be taken to extremes, especially when players seem to be writhing on the floor a little longer than necessary. This is especially noticeable while waiting for the end of Hyper Strike, when your goalkeeper tries to get the ball back into play. Here, some matches can fall into distracting all-out punches, with no one standing when the match really resumes.
Battle League’s reduction of items to the simplest items you’re likely to see in Mario Kart, as well as removing each character’s respective Charged superpowers, doesn’t help. The new Hyper Strike ability, activated by a glowing orb (think Super Smash Bros’ Smash Ball) now just provides a different animation depending on which character activates it. This is not the same as actually controlling Wario, as he unleashes a powdery fart to confuse nearby enemies, or Yoshi crushes the player into a giant egg, or Mario becomes oversized. Even a good period of passing the ball between your squad members seems less important as its metal balls take this more seriously over time.
This is what Battle League looks like — at launch, anyway. This striker series isn’t without features – I’ve often seen Wario staunchly tuck the football under his arm like a big liar, or watch another celebratory ball at the truly weird Varuigi and leave a chuckle. The ability to simply perform a Hyper Strike when an opponent slides in to stop you is very satisfying. And it’s already been suggested that the game will receive a post-launch updated roster with more characters. But even with that, even if the weekly striker club finally takes off, it’s hard to see the slim mode packs now offered compared to other non-football football games like Rocket League and then factoring in Nintendo’s typical boxed Switch game RRP , and can still recommend Battle League Quick Start.
