Super Mario Run

It's not quite vintage Mario, but this long-awaited mobile debut demonstrates an ingenuity and a keen appreciation of format that is quintessentially Nintendo. [Feb 2017, p.123]

Super Mario Run is great in its own right, but the high price and lack of offline play options are not to be overlooked. The game is mainly recommended for Mario fans and casual gamers, but don't expect to play it for days on end.

Super Mario Run is fun, entertaining and blessed by an amazing level design. The always online structure of the game can be painful for a huge number of players, though. How to suggest a mobile game you can’t play everywhere?

A brief but eminently enjoyable Mario game stretched out in all sorts of less than successful ways. A perfect port of Mario gameplay to a new platform but a deeply problematic port of mobile structure onto classic Mario.

A couple of hours of fun with only coin-hunting to keep you busy afterwards isn't substantial enough. If you want Mario on your iPhone, Super Mario Run does its best to approximate the trappings. On the other hand, if you're looking for a top-shelf auto-runner to play, it's-a not him.

Super Mario Run is an enjoyable but imperfect adaptation of the Mario games for touchscreen devices. Nintendo's unmatched craft in creating platformers is evident during the best moments of Super Mario Run, but the experience is sometimes hamstrung by the game's limited control. The all-too-brief World Tour is its strongest pillar, but I wish there were more to the game beyond playing the same levels again and again.

Yes, I wish it had more levels and less town-building, but Super Mario Run manages to feel like real Mario game even with only one button. It’s great to see that Nintendo is able to do so much with such a simple idea that most iOS users can easily pick up and enjoy...I just wish there was more of it.

Super Mario Run hits its stride when you’re making your way through new levels. The platforming is great, and the level design surprised me on multiple occasions. In these moments, I forgot I was playing a mobile translation of Mario. That fades fast, unfortunately, as Princess Peach was kissing me on the cheek thanking me for my service just as I felt I was getting started. Rewards exist for replaying those levels repeatedly, but they simply aren’t enough for me.

Simple controls be damned, Run offers great platforming and that distinct Mario charm that Nintendo's perfected over the years. It's a shame to find that it's on the easy side and bereft of a long-lasting platforming adventure, but it's the sort of game that you'll be happy to have in your pocket. Even if you don't play it to unlock every character and special course, finishing the game once will inspire you to dust off New Super Mario Bros. and revisit Run's quality roots on other platforms--a testament to the series' refined DNA than lives on in Run.

Very good and well-designed non-standard platformer that relies on its name and your patience more than it would be appropriate. [Issue #271]

Although Nintendo has introduced a few new features since release, Super Mario Run still feels like it’s missing something. It looks and feels like a proper Mario game, but it can quickly become so tiresome that we no longer play. It’s all too easy to exhaust Tour Mode and the Kingdom has no staying power. The free tier will be plenty for most Super Mario Runners, and for the full investors, you’ll soon be reduced to a few daily Rally runs.

The level design is amateur, the boss battles, save for the final confrontation with Bowser, are too simple, and the build mode left me indifferent to the whole shebang. The controls are there, but everything else feels like Mario b-sides, and that really shouldn't be the case with this grand entrance into the mobile market.

Super Mario Run does a nice job of capturing the feel of a classic Mario game. The fact that it needs to always be online in order to play deters me from grinding through its collectible driven-gameplay, however, since it limits when and where I can actually play the game—defeating one of the primary purposes of playing a mobile game in the first place.

Quotation forthcoming.

Overall, this is a solid debut for Mario away from the Nintendo ecosystem of consoles, but it’s nowhere near the heights of gameplay that the plumber is known for. Longtime fans might balk at playing a Mario game on iOS (and soon Android, too), but as of now there isn’t much to be worried about. Nintendo wanted to make a mobile Mario title that would offer just enough for players to have fun and want to buy a proper series installment, and I think that the company has succeeded in doing just that.