At first glance, Mario Party: Island Tour

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Island Tour features three main modes: Party, Minigames, and the exclusively single-player Bowser’s Tower. I might as well start with the most laborious of the three, Bowser’s Tower, which is Island Tour’s “campaign mode,” if you will. To clear a floor of Bowser’s 30-floor tower, you must beat three CPU opponents in one of two randomly chosen minigames. The issue here is that the CPU players are locked on easy difficulty for nearly every floor save for the last few (where they are bumped up to an innocuous “normal” level), so the challenge isn’t so much in beating each floor as it is in staying awake long enough to do so. Need to collect the most bunnies? You’ll have double if not triple the number of your nearest competitor. Need to finish a race first? The CPU players won’t even be on the same screen when you gracefully cross the finish line. It really is that bad. Admittedly, there are a few interesting boss battles, which pop up every fifth floor, but they are over all too soon and the monotonous hour-long grind to the Tower’s top resumes again. Having finished, I’ll be perfectly content to never set foot in Bowser’s Tower again.

Party mode is much better, even for solo players. Defying classic Mario Party design, the game boards here each feature their own unique objectives rather than the classic “collect the most stars in a certain number of turns” formula. Instead, you’ll be ducking in and out of cover as you scale a mountain and avoid Banzai Bills, or collecting rocket boosters to reach the end of a Mario Galaxy-themed level. Though his tower is a chore, Bowser’s game board is one of the more interesting, as the goal is to actually end the game furthest from the finish line, where the malevolent turtle awaits the “first place” player. This departure is a welcome surprise and adds much-needed variety.

As a multiplayer game, Island Tour is actually rather robust. Through Download Play, four people can access the any game board, character, or minigame from a single cart. The amount of content does mean that download times can be a little long, and I did have connection issues a couple of times that resulted in everyone being dropped, but for the most part things run smoothly once a game is loaded. Loading

Unfortunately, great game board designs and the ambitious Download Play options don’t make up for Island Tour’s key detraction: the minigames themselves are mostly bland, and a handful are just bad. If you’ve played a Mario Party game before, you’ll recognize that a majority of the games are based around returning ideas. Knock your opponents off a shrinking platform, be the last player to avoid getting smashed by a Thwomp, reach the end of a small platforming course first... it all feels very familiar. What’s most egregious, though, is when the 3DS’ accelerometer is brought into the action, requiring awkward jerking and rotating to, say, steer a rolling ball or rotate familiar Mario characters to match their arrangement in an image. It never felt comfortable to me and, assuming you like to play with 3D on, the screen becomes difficult to see in the midst of all the movement.

To be fair, there are some minigames that use the touchscreen effectively. One of my favorites involves connecting stars to create constellations in the shapes of Mario baddies, and another tasks you with being the first to completely color in a series of black-and-white images. Simple, sure, but at least it feels new to the series and unique to the hardware. Also, in an odd departure for the series, there are no 2v2 or 3v1 minigames, either of which could have really broken up the monotony of the “last standing” free-for-all games that dominate the selection. In my time with Island Tour, I found I had the most fun in between the forgettable minigames while navigating the much more inventive game boards themselves. Unfortunately that reprieve is brief, as minigames pop-up every couple of minutes.

Island Tour’s Minigames mode strips away the boards and allows you to play each minigame individually or in a couple of different competitions, with conditions like seeing who can complete 10 games the fastest or being the first to win three, five, or seven games. The variety of ways to play is great, but focusing purely on Island Tour’s lackluster minigames makes this a mode I don’t want to visit all that often.