When it comes to arcade-style, Mario-centered sports games, Camelot’s dueling Mario Golf and Mario Tennis franchises stand tall as the subgenre's granddaddies. Personally, I’ll take tennis over golf any day of the week, both in video games and in real life. However, I’ll try any sports game that doesn’t waste time trying to be “realistic.” Fortunately, the $59.99 Mario Golf: Super Rush continues the series' fun-filled gameplay, plus introduces many awesome and inventive ideas to the arcade golf formula. This Nintendo Switch game offers a great time on the green, whether you play online, multiplayer matches or solo adventures.

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Mario, Turf Master

Actual golf may be little more than a boring excuse to flaunt wealth, but arcade-style golf is a different story. Mario Golf: Super Rush plays more like minigolf shaped by a child's wild imagination.

Before you hit the ball, you angle your character in a chosen direction, and optionally open the map to see the wind conditions, terrain elevation, and the hole's distance. Then you pick your club; a driver is much different than a putter, after all. Once that’s selected, you time a button press on the power meter to determine the shot's strength. In a nice touch, the meter displays a sweet spot that'll place your shot as close to the hole as possible. Lastly, you time a final button press to execute a swing, and tilt the analog stick to determine the ball's flight path. 

Alternatively, you can pop off a single Joy-Con to use as a motion-controlled golf club. The motion controls feel great, much better than Mario Tennis Aces' disconnected Swing Mode. You’ll have major Wii Sports flashbacks. Ironically, the lack of precision makes swinging more satisfying; you must intuit how much force to apply, and the proper angle, to hit the ball where you want it to go.

Mario Golf: Super Rush features a wide cast of Mario characters to play as from Mario to Pauline to Chargin’ Chuck. Each character also sports a stylish new golf outfit. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Wario dressed up like a Texan oil baron, the type of person you'd see inside a private golf course. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the game could use more of that personality. The initial courses are pleasant, but bland, green parks that resemble a mediocre resort. I understand removing wacky obstacles from beginner courses, but the courses could still have wacky visuals. Even later courses that feature fantastical Mario elements, such as towering Pokeys and snaking Piranha Plants, are weirdly conservative in their visual design. Nintendo announced that more courses are coming as DLC, including an exciting New Donk City course, so hopefully those greens contain lots of silliness. On the topic of visuals, I noticed minor resolution dips while playing the game in handheld mode.

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Faster Than the Speed of Golf

Mario Golf: Super Rush offers more than just standard golf, though. Whether you play online or offline, you can also opt for the Speed Golf and Battle Golf modes. These modes are absurd and awesome.

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In Speed Golf, after you hit the ball, you must physically run to where the ball landed to make your next shot. Forget golf carts; everyone makes a mad dash on foot. Beyond the hilarity of it all, Speed Golf requires strategic thinking about when to dash and when to conserve stamina. You can also drift behind other characters, Mario Kart-style, to gain a boost. The goal is to beat the course in the fastest time, but each extra stroke adds to your clock. So, you must play well, not just fast.

Battle Golf takes many of these ideas and puts them into an even more combative context. Here, whenever you finish a hole, you claim it as your own. The neon-colored map only has so many holes, so you must be quick and devious to claim three holes and victory. Your character’s special attack, like turning the ball into a projectile that blasts away other balls, proves especially useful in Battle Golf. 

If games like Mario Tennis Aces and Knockout City turn their respective sports into fighting games, Mario Golf: Super Rush turns golf into a racing game. The pressure that comes from balancing velocity with intelligence feels like a golf take on speed chess. It’s clever and fresh.

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Hole in One

People loved the older, Camelot-developed, handheld Mario sports games because they contained quaint, RPG-style single-player modes. If you've played Golf Story on the Switch, you've basically played an indie imitation of Mario Golf on the Game Boy. Like those games, Mario Golf: Super Rush has a solo adventure mode. Although it’s a glorified tutorial (even something as casual as Miitopia is more of an RPG), it offers plenty of content when you want to golf alone.

Unlike Mario Tennis Aces’ basic map, Speed Run's multi-hour journey takes you to various, themed hubs. You talk to locals, buy new equipment, and learn about the local challenge that you must complete to earn your next badge. The challenges are nicely varied. In the desert, you must complete a speed golf course before you run out of water. The cross-country golf course places you in one interconnected map with all holes available at once. It’s up to you to determine the right order to tackle the holes without exceeding the stroke limit. You’ll even make meta choices, such as carrying fewer heavy clubs to exchange shot options for increased running speed.

Golf is a slow-paced sport by nature, even in this turbo-charged version, so it works as a RPG. Still, some challenges are more tedious than enjoyable. It’s annoying to lose all your progress at the end of a lengthy mission due to one bad shot. On the upside, you earn experience points during those failed missions, so you can improve your character's Control, Power, Stamina, and other abilities. That said, the golfing is so fun that setbacks don’t sting too much. Playing more Mario Golf is far from the worst punishment.