I must admit, if you asked me before this game released what I thought I'd be giving on this site, months later, it would be a 5/5. That's how excited and confident I was going in. I'm as devastated as a plumber who forgot his utility belt. I can't believe I don't care for it.

I have always felt Strikers was the best of all of the Mario Sports games, easily. Baseball comes close, as does Tennis on Gamecube. Heck, I even thoroughly enjoyed Mario Tennis Aces on Switch for months. It was a great online game.

First, let's get a couple of the good things out of the way. This games art style is unmatched. I LOVE how they draw the characters. If only they actually looked that cool in-game and it wasn't just for promotional art. I also LOVE the colour schemes and the way the UI looks. This game is one of the best looking games, art-style wise, that I've ever seen. It's hilarious because I feel like if I worked at a video game company, I would literally make a game that looked similar to this in a lot of ways. It's 100% my style.

I also really like the base gameplay of this game, but that's something that I could say for the previous two games. Not much has changed here regarding the core of how it plays.

The gear system is cool and it would have been something to appreciate in the long run as new gear was added, but... there is no long-run, here. They had a great idea: make characters more customizable to make up for the smaller roster. Make it so that small characters can be powerful, or the tough characters can be agile. However, this brings up the main problem of the game. People quickly realized there were only a few "feasible combinations". Aaaand, your system is pointless.

That's about where the good things end...

The items are pretty poorly balanced. The way stars are rewarded for being down in points is frustrating.

After hearing/reading a lot of comments online regarding this game, I must say I do not fall in line with the general critiques it seems to constantly get.

The problem with this game is NOT how much "content" it does or does not have. The problem is that it does not feel very replayable. It doesn't matter if there "aren't enough characters". What matters is that within whatever amount of characters you have to chose from, you don't have fun/varied matches. Every match ends up being similar. Regardless of your skill level, people found a few ways to go about winning and those methods are repeated over and over. There's not a lot of room for creativity or experimentation. After I got really good at the game, it felt trivial to continue to win. It was easy. Sure, I moved on to playing people better than me and got wrecked because they knew of a better formula. But... it just doesn't go any further than that.

This game feels like there's a "correct" way to score goals. It reduces the game in to a pretty stale pattern of both teams trying to accomplish the same simple task. The goalie is stupid and can be easily manipulated.

Stop using "lack of content" as a reason a game is bad. This game absolutely did not "need" more than 10 characters. It could have been totally fine with those 10. It's just no different from match to match, and that's just not fun after a while.

I say that as someone who frequently uses Daisy in Mario games, and I was very upset she wasn't included (at first). Roster size does not make or break a game. Different stadiums literally don't matter. Don't keep pushing the narrative that every game needs to suckle from the teat of Fortnite and cram new things down your throat every week.

I thought this game was gonna be my second favourite of the year. For the first couple days of playing it, it actually kind of was. I loved it until I realized there was no reason to keep playing the same match over and over. Turns out it's not even gonna be in my Top 10 games this year. :(

I'm sad.