Super Mario Bros Wonder review: Nintendo retires Switch in spectacular fashion
It’s a real “wanna feel old…?” moment when you realise Nintendo has been tinkering with the formula for Super Mario Bros for almost 40 years. Over that time it’s released at least a dozen side-scrolling platformers starring the Italian plumber, remixing and reiterating the same basic elements to produce some of the most innovative and joyous games ever made.
Super Mario Bros Wonder takes that core principle and runs farther with it than any entry in the series to date, leaning extra hard into the sheer silliness of it all to create a game with pure, unadulterated fun coded into its DNA.
This manifests in all kinds of ways. A new power-up turns Mario into an elephant. Why? Who knows! Now you have a trunk! You can use it to spray water! Also, Mario’s long-standing nemesis Bowser has turned into a castle! Does that mean people live inside him now? Probably!
Never is this sense of, well, wonder more evident than when Mario finds the special flowers hidden in almost every level. These psychedelic plants change the rules of the game – upon consumption, Mario may become incredibly tall, or start falling upwards into the sky, or turn into a goomba, or find himself being charged by a herd of bulls. Time might speed up, or slow down, or the game’s perspective might shift so that suddenly you’re looking at Mario from above, allowing you to traverse the world in a different way. Some of these tricks are repeated but surprisingly few.
Even the humour feels subtly different this time around, more knowingly absurd, like when Bowser brags about how great it feels to be, quite literally, a castle, or when the talking flowers dotted all around say things like “I wonder what goombas taste like?”
Younger gamers, perhaps lured in by the success of this year’s Super Mario Bros movie, are made to feel extra welcome, with the more sadistic tendencies of the earlier titles stripped away. The difficulty is further tempered by collectible ‘badges’ that let you choose an extra buff: a higher, ‘floaty’ jump; the ability to use your cap as a parachute; an upwards ‘wall-bounce’.
You can even get some help from your mates thanks to four-player co-op (both couch and online). And if all that fails, you can play as Yoshi, who is immune to damage. That’s not to say it’s all a walk in the park: some of the rhythm stages in particular took me a dozen or more attempts.
The Nintendo Switch is, by some measures, the most successful console of all time and, with rumours of a successor rife, it’s fitting that it was bookended by two peerless Mario games. In 2017 Odyssey showed what a next-generation Mario game could look like. Now Super Mario Wonder has proven that there’s life in the side-scrolling version, too.