Mario Golf: Super Rush is one of Nintendo's major releases for the summer, but it's far from a hole in one. By no means a bad game, Mario Golf: Super Rush also isn't going to make a lasting impression on anyone, which makes it feel like a largely temporary and fleeting iteration of a franchise with a lot more potential. There's a lot of seeds for great ideas that other games could learn a lot from, but as of right now, it's hard to say that Mario Golf: Super Rush will be anything more than something to kill some time while on the go.

A majority of the content in Mario Golf: Super Rush lacks the necessary variety or diversity to make it particularly engaging. Perhaps the biggest reason to play the game is Mario Golf: Super Rush's campaign mode, called Golf Adventure, which is essentially a mini-RPG where the player creates a custom Mii to play as in a career mode-style experience. They start as a rookie and work their way up, earning coins to buy new gear, building out stats, and interacting with a variety of Mario-based characters. It's not as deep as one may hope for it to be, but there's enough there to engage with and actually lays a foundation that many other sports franchises would benefit from.

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It's easily the most fleshed out and comprehensive of all the modes in the game, but also perhaps the only one with any actual feeling of pressure or challenge. Mario Golf: Super Rush has four modes total and the others just don't have that same feeling of intensity as Golf Adventure. Outside of standard golfing, there's also Speed Golf and Battle Golf. Speed Golf forces all players to dash toward wherever their ball landed as opposed to being automatically teleported, creating a race to be the first to score. Despite the other players sprinting around and the clock in the corner, it still lacks a feeling of urgency or competition that something like Mario Kart has. Perhaps the AI just isn't aggressive enough in its efforts to mess the player up by using special abilities, but it just ends up feeling like regular golf with some extra running involved.

Mario Golf Super Rush Speed Golf

Mario Golf: Super Rush's Battle Golf, on the other hand, is a far more chaotic version of Speed Golf. There are 9 holes that are available all at once in one giant arena, meaning anyone can go in any direction or fight over the same hole. The goal is to have the most holes scored out of the other players and this is when it actually feels like the character's abilities have the most impact. If an opponent is "on the green" of a certain hole, a player can activate their special ability, which often just explodes the ground wherever the ball lands, causing other balls to scatter. It can buy a lot of time and prevent an opponent from scoring, but that leads into another issue: A lot of the time there's just constant ability abuse, putting the player into brief yet frequent stun locks and pushing them around. It's ironically a bit too chaotic, at least with AI, so it seems there's a balancing issue across the modes.

There's also a lack of diverse abilities in Mario Golf: Super Rush's 17 playable characters. 11 of the 17 characters have a similar ability of their ball exploding on impact or something similar. While some can also hit the ball further than others or have higher stamina, it just never felt like any of it actually mattered in a substantial way. Any player can get away using virtually any of the golfers present, which almost makes it pointless to have so many to choose from if the only thing noteworthy difference is their animations.

Overall, Mario Golf: Super Rush has a few interesting ideas, but it fails to give any meaningful purpose to most of its content. That goes from its character roster to its handful of modes, leaving players with a rather vapid experience outside of the pretty innovative Golf Adventure mode. It likely would've been better suited had the game focused on Golf Adventure rather than the other two modes, but instead the focus was split. Perhaps the already announced DLC for Mario Golf: Super Rush will help flesh the game out more and put meat on the game's fun, albeit hallow, bones.

Next: Mario Golf: Super Rush Is Missing Some Crucial Characters

Mario Golf: Super Rush releases for Nintendo Switch on June 25. A review code was provided to Screen Rant ahead of launch for the purposes of this review.