After Mario Tennis Aces proved my assumptions about the Switch Mario Sports games being generic and middling in their gameplay, I was kind of excited to play through Mario Golf Super Rush and see if it was any good, only to find out that my assumptions were true all along and Mario Tennis Aces is just an outlier. Now yes, overall I'd still say that Mario Golf Super Rush is a good game at the very least but there are several aspects that really hold it back from being anything more than that in my eyes.

The gameplay here is easily my biggest problem with the game. Instead of focusing on just making really fun and deep golf mechanics like Toadstool Tour did, the developers decided to tone things down in that area and instead decided to focus on the new feature of running to your ball after you shoot it. This feature is used throughout 90% of the game modes and it's really tedious as opposed to fun, you can use sprint to get to your ball but you have a stamina bar that runs out really fast, so you end up kinda just walking to it while you wait for your bar to replenish. I found this new feature to be incredibly tedious and the antithesis of fun, it's almost like previous games in the series left this out because they knew it wouldn't be fun. The base game courses here are kinda what you'd expect from these games, the courses added in free updates though are really fun to playthrough though, my favorite being the New Donk City course which feels straight pulled from Super Mario Odyssey and works surprisingly well as a golf course. And then the character selection here is also great, having all the characters you'd expect and some out there ones that are fun to see like King Bob-Omb and Ninji. As much as I enjoy the roster inclusions though, the playstyles of each character feel very much one in the same here and there isn't much reason to choose one character over another besides personal preference.

In terms of content there is quite a lot here surprisingly, but none of it is all that good. The main single player mode is Adventure mode, which again is refreshing to see rather than just another tournament mode where you play through all the courses in order to win. Adventure mode sees you taking control of your Mii character running around an oversold and completing golf challenges and tournaments on each of the game's various courses. Unlike Mario Tennis Aces before it however, Mario Golf Super Rush plays things incredibly straight with its story mode, no deep story, unique minigames and much fewer unique boss fights (though there are a few), it's just the generic and easy kind of adventure mode that you'd expect from one of these games and it's over before you know it. Apart from that there's the online mode (which seeing as this game came out in 2021 and was forgotten about in a few weeks is of course now mostly dead), the solo challenge mode which offers a few more challenges to hone your skills at the game but really isn't anything more substantial than filler here, and the basic golf mode and that's it.

With its removal of meaningful depth in favor of tedious gameplay mechanics and lack of substantial content and charm I cannot say that I found Mario Golf Super Rush to be a great game, still though it's courses and basic golf gameplay are slightly fun enough to me saying its entirely bad either. I really wanted to like Mario Super Rush more than this, I wanted to believe that Nintendo still can make really fun Mario Sports games like they used to, but with its mediocre showing and the incredibly disappointing Mario Sports game that I know comes right after it I cannot in good conscious believe that they can.