Can you believe it? After nearly 15 years, a brand new Mario Strikers will grace our Nintendo Switch consoles with tight soccer gameplay and truly wild character designs.
Mario Strikers: Battle League features five on five gameplay and allows up to eight players to play at a single time. Items like Green Shells and Giant Bananas can be used against the enemy team and don’t forget, you can get rough and slam right through them to get the ball. Special shots return and it looks like each character has their own version. Making these shots will net you two points instead of one.
As for fields, it looks like the usual sort of Mushroom Kingdom lands make their appearance. There’s a generic grasslands field, a Donkey Kong jungle field, a Bowser’s Castle field, and some kind of fancy field with a tiled surrounding and potted plants. And it looks like you can take different halves of two fields and smash them together to make something a little more unique. Nice!
Online mode is back! Outside normal matches, there’s a new club mode where up to 20 players can join a club and compete for placement in rankings.
Characters! Rosalina joins the roster and the other nine characters return from the previous entry from all the way back on the Wii. Character stats can be adjusted with gear. These special items will change your appearance too. Looks like sidekicks are not a thing anymore and instead you select any of the playable characters to form your team. Oh, and Boom Boom is your goalie! The list of characters include:
- Mario
- Luigi
- Bowser
- Peach
- Rosalina
- Toad
- Yoshi
- Donkey Kong
- Wario
- Waluigi
Yup, no Daisy. Just like Mario Party Superstars when it was first announced, Daisy is nowhere to be seen. And just like when she was eventually revealed, she’ll likely get the tanner skin tone change. Check out a batch of screenshots here:
Mario Strikers: Battle League is set to release on June 10 on the Nintendo Switch.