Overview
Mario Strikers: Battle League Football is a football game developed by Next Level Games and published by Nintendo, released in 2022. I played it on Nintendo Switch.
I bought the game out of nostalgia for Super Mario Strikers on GameCube, and I was hugely disappointed by this entry.
Story and world
The game has no story. You get the characters from the Mario universe, facing off on pitches surrounded by an electric fence, with rough tackles and items.
In single player, the content is limited to tournaments against the computer. Everything else relies on multiplayer, local or online, with the Strikers Club mode.
Gameplay
Matches pit two teams of five players against each other: four characters and a goalkeeper. You can tackle, use items and trigger Hyper Strikes, special shots that count as two goals. Each character can also be given gear that changes their stats.
There is little content: few playable characters, few pitches, and the quality of the content is lower. The pitches are purely cosmetic and add nothing to the game (no lava in the middle of the pitch, for example).
As soon as you play two characters with similar stats, you are literally playing two clones, with only different assets.
Graphics and music
The gear you choose is visible on the characters during matches, and each Hyper Strike triggers a short animation. The pitches change their scenery, but not their rules.
Verdict
No, honestly, a massive flop. Little content, pitches with no impact and characters that are too similar. Updates may have improved the game since, but I never touched it again after my few hours of testing.