Super Mario Party Jamboree is Mario Party at its best

A Mario Party game is admittedly somewhat strange to preview. After all, each new entry in the long-running series is just a different collection of mini-games. You more or less know what you’re going to get.

That being said, there’s nothing wrong with that — it just means that a new Mario Party is comfort food. And in the case of the series’ latest entry, Super Mario Party Jamboree, you’re getting the most filling comfort food to date.

In a rapid-fire demo at PAX West 2024, we got to sample a variety of content from the biggest Mario Party to date, including one of the new boards and tons of mini-games. The new board that caught my eye the most was the glossy shopping mall, although we unfortunately didn’t get to try it. Instead, we got a few rounds on the new ‘Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party,’ a cozy forest area that houses the giant titular caterpillar-like creature in the centre.

Naturally, I went with my man Waluigi, while the others picked Pauline and Ninji (new playable characters) and the returning Shy Guy. (Our group got a particular delight in ragging on poor ol’ Shy Guy’s misfortunes in classic Mario Party feud fashion.) For the purposes of our demo, we only played a few rounds, but I liked the gimmick of having the Wiggler as both a platform and sleeping threat in the middle that you can try to awaken and disrupt other players. Some of the standout mini-games we saw included escaping a haunted graveyard by trying to pick out the right key for the right door, a platforming obstacle course in which baked goods were dropped on us, an arcade-style game where you have to rapidly use a mechanical arm to push toys and blocks into the chute and a co-operative “try to cut the steak in half as evenly as possible” challenge. All in all, there was an impressive amount of variety here.

But of course, Mario Party isn’t solely about friendly rivalries — it also offers the opportunity for thrilling team-ups. In my favourite part of the demo, we tried Bowser Kaboom Squad, a fast-paced mode in which you work together to run around a town square evading a towering Imposter Bowser and his smaller minions to destroy crates and lug bombs back to a cannon. Once you load enough bombs, you’ll fire upon the fire-breathing turtle to lower his HP. Then, of course, there are mini-games in between each round, and you can pick power-ups upon the completion of them (like bananas to stun Bowser, speed pads to run faster with bombs and hearts to restore teammates who’ve been incapacitated by Bowser).

This added a welcome strategic wrinkle to the fray, as my group coordinated who would take each power-up and where to deploy them on the map. Once you deplete Bowser’s health, you all get the Superstar to turn invincible and mash the interact button to hammer away at Bowser and send him flying away. It’s a delightfully satisfying and dazzling way to end the mode.

As I think back on all of this content, I should say that any Mario Party is a bit tricky to “critique” because, naturally, some mini-games will be better than others. That said, with so many of them, you can’t really get upset at any particular one. My only real gripe, then, is that the pace of the demo meant we didn’t get much time to be properly introduced to some of the mini-games and modes, like an online multiplayer one we only briefly sampled that has you beating mini-games to get further along in a jet ski race. But to be fair, Mario Party is basically a big buffet, and this only has me wanting to go back for seconds.

Thankfully, the wait for that won’t be long at all, as the game will launch exclusively on the Nintendo Switch on October 17th, 2024. Super Mario Party Jamboree wasn’t the only Nintendo game I checked out at PAX; you can also read our preview of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. I also have a round-up of my favourite games from the show, Nintendo or otherwise.

Image credit: Nintendo