Mario Hoops: Tons of fun, but has a few misses along the way...
First off, the game is obviously basketball portrayed through the Mario universe. So obviously you can assume regular sporting rules will be twisted or completely thrown out all together...mmmm which is the case here. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The area where users will notice the most difference from a normal basketball game comes in the scoring department. You definitely wont see any shots that are worth 2 points. Every shot in the game that’s normally 2, is now 20. That’s right, 20. And users can add to this default 20 by collecting coins before hand. If the user dunks while having 40 coins...well now that dunk just became worth 60 points. You’ll end up having games with scores over 500, and even far above that occasionally.
To further explain the coin system, let me start out by saying this is my least favorite part of the game itself. In order to win, or score big, you are reliant on collecting coins. There are question mark boxes along the floor of all the courts, and when the user dribbles on top of them you collect the coins inside them. In order to do this though, the user usually ends up holding onto the ball just mindlessly dribbling around for 20-40 seconds at a time if you want a lot of coins. Needless to say, there are NO shot clock violations in this game. But I feel this need to get coins, and dribble around picking them up really takes the user away from the game of basketball, which is a shame. I personally would rather concentrate more on the sport then seeing how many coins I can collect without having my opponent knock me down only to have me spill the coins all over the court...yea that gets frustrating.
But enough of the down side, cause this is where i disagree with many of the reviews I've seen online. This game is just ridiculously fun. Putting the coin system aside, the game controls amazing. Everything is done with a swipe of the stylus. Passing is done by swiping left to right, and shooting is done by swiping down to up. Now I’m just touching the basics. There are SO many moves the dev team crammed into this game. And the game comes with a great tutorial mode that really explains all the tricks and moves very well. I suggest playing the tutorial extensively until you got a knack for moving your players and the ball around the court. Not to mention this is one of the best looking DS games to date. Amazingly vibrant colors, and fast animation with no slowdown are what you’ll get with this game.
The game also features great multiplayer. Though to really enjoy it you’ll need multi carts. The single download play does leave a little to be desired in that you don’t get a regular basketball match but rather a few select mini games. eh.
Overall, I enjoy this game very much. There’s tons of unlockables which will have you coming back to the game often to play it more to just see what else you can unlock. Its true, dont expect a true to sport basketball sim, because you definitely wont get it. But if you enjoy the other games in the mario sport series, then there’s no reason why you wont enjoy this title. Plus donkey kong can dunk like whoa.
-MC543