Reviewed on:
Nintendo WiiAlso available for:
N/A
The Good:
A fun, largely lag-free online mode, and if you unlock the right cheats, the offline multi-player is a brilliant simulacrum of street hockey.The Bad:
Diabolically unbalanced game design, with far too many over-powered features to be exploited, both offline and on. Limited single-player mode.The Verdict:
Mario Strikers Charged might be the most infuriatingly unbalanced title I've played since the last Mario sports title, but its online mode is a step in the right direction.
A rather strange thing has happened to Mario Strikers Charged in the couple of months it took to cross the Atlantic after a successful launch in Europe; it's managed to completely lose all references to football, despite ostensibly being a football game.
Football, known to most Canadians and Americans as "soccer," is far from being as popular in North America as it is in the rest of the world, so it makes perfect sense that they'd excise all reference to a sport that's largely derided on this continent as a slow, goal-scarce game played by people who fall down clutching their ankles if you happen to look at them cross-eyed.
However, Mario Strikers Charged, developed by the Vancouver-based Next Level Games, has far more in common with that favourite Canadian pastime of street hockey than it does with even the most wildly delinquent game of football. The resemblance is plain to see. In Mario Strikers Charged, players play five-a-side games in an enclosed arena, are able to tackle opponents in any way they see fit, including slamming their opponent into the boundaries. The crocodile-like goalkeepers are as physically imposing and as difficult to score on as the most heavily padded goaltender.
With all of these similarities, the rough-and-tumble game design is actually far more suited to a devotee of hockey brawls than it is anyone who appreciates the flowing purity of football — and the game would be easy to recommend if the design had only gone so far.
Excess Features
Unfortunately, making a fast-paced, hockey-like title clearly wasn't enough for Nintendo, and like every other Mario sports game (tennis, baseball, basketball, you name it) it has been complicated with far too many unnecessary features, leaving it completely unbalanced.
The most obvious culprit has to be the new "Mega Strike" feature. In what can only be seen as a sop to the requirement that Wii games use the system's unique controls for something, players can score up to a ludicrous six goals in one shot by charging their team captain's shot and successfully clicking some points on a power meter. The player on the receiving end is given the chance to catch each of these shots by pointing and clicking at them with the Wii Remote as they appear on screen.
With enough practice on defence, the Mega Strike feature isn't as completely game-breaking as it first appears, but it can turn many matches into a desperate battle to stop your opponent running up the score. With each Mega Strike involving an inescapable cut-scene, things can quickly become as dull and as stilted as summon-heavy battle in a Final Fantasy title.
To make things worse, each of the team captains (selected from the usual suspects of Mario, Peach, Bowser et al.) and the sidekicks (generic Mario characters such as Toads and Koopas) have their own special moves and shots to throw things further out of balance.
For example: The Hammer Bros. feature a seemingly unstoppable shot; Waluigi can use a power-up to shoot an almost certain six-shot Megastrike; and Toad can jump the keeper with an alarming regularity.
In the end, goals scored from players abusing overpowered special shots outnumber goals scored from a combination of skillful passing and player placement by as much as 20 to 1.
Online and Offline
The lack of balance is a fairly big issue when we consider Mario Strikers Charged is the Wii's first real introduction to online play. Although the game maintains the annoying requirement that players swap a friend code in order to play online, gamers can easily play against random opponents from within the same country by choosing to play Ranked matches. Games are surprisingly quick to set up and I've yet to experience any lag.
Simply playing against other people makes Mario Strikers Charged more fun than it is normally, even if you're almost always playing against someone trying and achieve a cheap win.
It's not easy to say how long before players will tire of the unbalanced design, but the competition to be the best player of each weekly season (and have your Mii seen on Wiis across the country) does add some longevity.
Single-player mode is found lacking in several areas. While the Strikers Challenge mode is a fun, it's short on missions. The main Road to Strikers Cup mode is one long campaign of matches that you have to play through with one team; you can't choose to play a later cup with a different team. This is a mind-boggling flaw and one which compounds the lack of league, cup and career options so familiar from other football games.
Cheating to Win
There's something very wrong about a game where I spent my time playing the Strikers Challenge mode just to unlock cheats that would allow me to turn off its special shots features when playing offline against an opponent. Doing so turns the game into a superb simulacrum of street hockey and it's unfortunate that the single and online multiplayer modes don't allow you the same options.
