An extremely strong foundation but it's missing any combination of things that could make it perfect.
The biggest problem I have is how often 1-1 and 1-2 show up. To put it into perspective, the game says I have cleared 1-1 84 times and 1-2 51 times. The third highest clear is 1-3 at 19 times.
I'm still not 100% sure what determines the course chosen, I assume the course you pick at the start adds that course into the pool, and most players are just picking 1-1 and 1-2, however I do notice that when there's fewer players more "hard" levels show up, which makes me think it might only choose courses from players still alive, however that can't be right as the course I pick not show up even in a 1v1 situation. Selecting a course at the start has no obvious impact at all from what I can tell.
Another problem with 1-1 and 1-2 spam is how easy those levels are to rack up time and coins. Both have easily accessible stars which are OP as fuck in this game for gathering time, and 1-1 in particular makes it super easy to get the fire flower, another OP item. Like seriously the difficulty of the enemy spam in the game is way too large depending on if you have a fire flower or not.
The endgame is way too long too. It gets to 10 players surprisingly fast, but those final 5 can last for 10+ minutes.
The way I'd improve it is to either make all the courses go in order, so you can't just spam the easy ones. That way there'd be both a benefit to moving faster (being able to send the stronger enemies to opponents before anyone else) and a downside since you also end up dealing with harder platforming. Right now there's no reason to get through a level as fast as possible because as long as you're on 1-1 or 1-2 it's so easy to keep your timer up and have easy platforming, compared to something like 1-3 which is a much slower stage.
Another way it could be improved is by not reseting resources in a level. So once you get those item boxes in 1-1 you can't farm them from there anymore, and once you use that star it can't be used over and over to get easy time.
If the game could just negate the ability to farm 1-1 and 1-2 all the time, and give more variety, it'd be so much better.
I'll also say it'd be nice to have more ways to interact with other players rather than just sending them fodder for their fire flowers. Something like items with various effects like speeding up the enemies on their screen.
A couple other changes I think might benefit:
-Remove the fire flower and stars from boxes in the game. They trivialise everything. Having only base Mario/Big Mario would make this so much more interesting and make the whole "sending enemies to the opponent" thing actually feel like a threat. This is in combination with the next point:
-Make the item roulette wheel go up in price every time it's used. It's so easy to rack up hundreds of coins in the early game so that when things do start getting harder you can just spam the wheel to keep refreshing your fire flower.
Unless any changes get made this is a fun way to play Mario Bros but is otherwise very repetitive and too simplistic to last. But maybe that's why it's a limited time release anyway.
The biggest problem I have is how often 1-1 and 1-2 show up. To put it into perspective, the game says I have cleared 1-1 84 times and 1-2 51 times. The third highest clear is 1-3 at 19 times.
I'm still not 100% sure what determines the course chosen, I assume the course you pick at the start adds that course into the pool, and most players are just picking 1-1 and 1-2, however I do notice that when there's fewer players more "hard" levels show up, which makes me think it might only choose courses from players still alive, however that can't be right as the course I pick not show up even in a 1v1 situation. Selecting a course at the start has no obvious impact at all from what I can tell.
Another problem with 1-1 and 1-2 spam is how easy those levels are to rack up time and coins. Both have easily accessible stars which are OP as fuck in this game for gathering time, and 1-1 in particular makes it super easy to get the fire flower, another OP item. Like seriously the difficulty of the enemy spam in the game is way too large depending on if you have a fire flower or not.
The endgame is way too long too. It gets to 10 players surprisingly fast, but those final 5 can last for 10+ minutes.
The way I'd improve it is to either make all the courses go in order, so you can't just spam the easy ones. That way there'd be both a benefit to moving faster (being able to send the stronger enemies to opponents before anyone else) and a downside since you also end up dealing with harder platforming. Right now there's no reason to get through a level as fast as possible because as long as you're on 1-1 or 1-2 it's so easy to keep your timer up and have easy platforming, compared to something like 1-3 which is a much slower stage.
Another way it could be improved is by not reseting resources in a level. So once you get those item boxes in 1-1 you can't farm them from there anymore, and once you use that star it can't be used over and over to get easy time.
If the game could just negate the ability to farm 1-1 and 1-2 all the time, and give more variety, it'd be so much better.
I'll also say it'd be nice to have more ways to interact with other players rather than just sending them fodder for their fire flowers. Something like items with various effects like speeding up the enemies on their screen.
A couple other changes I think might benefit:
-Remove the fire flower and stars from boxes in the game. They trivialise everything. Having only base Mario/Big Mario would make this so much more interesting and make the whole "sending enemies to the opponent" thing actually feel like a threat. This is in combination with the next point:
-Make the item roulette wheel go up in price every time it's used. It's so easy to rack up hundreds of coins in the early game so that when things do start getting harder you can just spam the wheel to keep refreshing your fire flower.
Unless any changes get made this is a fun way to play Mario Bros but is otherwise very repetitive and too simplistic to last. But maybe that's why it's a limited time release anyway.
loinbread
3 years ago