Super Mario Bros. 35 is a fantastic game that stumbles over its own short legs. Its premise is my dream battle royale: make 35 players compete in randomly selected Super Mario Bros. levels, where defeated foes from bowser's army are sent to other players' games to hassle them. This keeps the single player experience intact while offering a competitive twist that makes the game feel tense but never mean-spirited. However—like with any multiplayer game—an optimal way to play bubbles to the surface, and boy howdy is it boring.
Super Mario Bros. 35 suffers from a fatal flaw, one I assume could be easily fixed: too many damn World 1 levels. Before each session, each player picks a course from Super Mario Bros. they want added to the play pool—and most seem to either pick 1-1 or 1-2. That, or they're added to the pool as filler levels, because their prevalence is maddening. I have over 200 clears of 1-1 and nearly half that for 1-2, meanwhile everything beyond world 5 has been played once or twice at most. While the early stages provide a nice reprieve to collect fire flowers and hidden 1-ups, this comes at the cost of your adrenaline and excitement, as it's a fairly safe, uneventful and thoughtless run (unless a squad of lakitus is being sent your way.)
The abundance of early levels vastly extends Super Mario Bros. 35's optimal play time, turning what should be a rapid-fire adventure through oldschool courses into a sloggy, amateurish affair, every World 1 stage a boring pitstop you're rarely in need of. This issue isn't so terrible as to turn me off from the game, but I'm only reminded of how invigorating the game can be when a random gauntlet of tricky stages comes at me back to back (like 3-4 -> 2-2 -> 5-3). Not only does this wake me up from the rote stupor 1-1 lulls me into, but it provides a decent challenge that's likely to knock out a few players, even when it's down to the final five left.
And getting to the final five is another source of my frustration, since this is where you'll be spending most of your time. When you first reach this threshold it's a thrilling, nerve-wracking experience that'll have you crossing your fingers over even the smallest jumps, but the excitement fades when you learn what a long road you have ahead of you. After the initial 15 or so players are culled thanks to the first two stages, Super Mario Bros. 35 becomes about keeping your timer high and collecting a lot of coins. You extend your timer in a number of different ways, most noticeably by repeated kills via stomping heads and kicking shells. The coins on the other hand feed into the game's roulette power-up system, which can provide you with an instantaneous—albeit random—goodie at the cost of twenty coins.
On paper, both of these are excellent ideas. They give you a reason to explore the level as well and not skip over enemies, instead of turning success into a speedrunning competition. But conversely, it means that speed is downright useless—as long as you're receiving a steady trickle of foes from other players, you can keep your clock fed by slowly inching forward, hopping from one noggin to the next. This, combined with the ever-present 1-1 (as well as 1-2's warp pipes to skip problematic stages,) turns the game into a resource management of sorts. As boring as the World 1 stages are, you're better off spending as much time as possible in them collecting goodies to prepare for the endgame. After about seven minutes (which is quite long in game about reflexes) the timer in the corner will rapidly tick down, making whoever stays in the game the longest the winner—and this is usually the person with the most coins.
The issue of the slow, grindy gameplay preceding the frantic endgame isn't something that has an easy fix. The best I can come up with is that there should be some kind of speed incentive, like the flag at the end adding 60 seconds to your timer instead of a measly 15. Or maybe introducing a certain amount of stages to beat in order to claim the crown. As it stands I'm too easily bored by the monotony of the early game but find myself entering the endgame at a disadvantage. That's not to say that I'm unable to eke out a win by simply playing well, but when I lose to time it feels like there was very little I could've done, especially when my reserve of coins is wasted rolling POW blocks over and over again. For what it's worth, the endgame with the red clock is at least exhilarating every time you reach it, which is a lot more than I can say about starting on 1-1 for the umpteenth time.
Super Mario Bros. 35 is an clever competitive-platformer, but it'd be massively improved if latter levels were shuffled into the mix more often, or was quicker to reach the endgame. And hey, for all I know, this is an issue that'll fix itself as newer players drop out and the hardened vets that love running 8-1 are the only ones that remain. But like with No Man's Sky, I can only form my opinion and what the game currently is, not what it'll become some time down the road (speaking of, what reason is there to pull the game on April 1st Nintendo?) I have no plans to stop playing Super Mario Bros. 35 any time soon, but I've spent enough time with it to see that—while it's loads of fun—it's not quite the ideal Mario battle royale I had hoped for.
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