Take the solid core this series has established, ditch the turns and wait times in favor of fast-paced mad dashes to each ball, give every character their own unique abilities to add more strategy, and introduce vast interconnected courses so you can battle it out with others in an effort to score the most holes.

On paper, Mario Golf: Super Rush sounds like a wild and ambitious reinvention of the titular sport that takes more cues from frantic multiplayer outings like Mario Kart than anything else. In practice... well, the game's not that. I'm not Camelot, so I can never know for sure, but it seems relatively safe to assume the game had a rushed development that resulted in a lot of cut corners, from the frankly baffling pacing of the story mode to Battle Golf being confined to essentially two courses when all of them could theoretically support it. Even post-launch support did little to fix this, and said support was cut painfully short compared to its tennis counterpart.

At the end of the day, the game's still fun, and I boot it up every now for some Speed Golf rounds. However, more than maybe any other game in recent memory, it's frustrating to see concepts loaded with potential feeling half-baked and rough around the edges. I really hope Camelot's allowed a second go with the ideas in here, where they can really take their time and explore them to the fullest.