Developer: Sora Ltd.
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Fighting
Players: 1-8 locally, 1-4 online
Console: Wii U
Hours Played: ~30 hours
Progress: Unlocked all characters and stages, played the new Smash Tour mode a few times, completed all Solo events and about 1/3 of the Co-op Events, played a handful of Crazy Orders/Master Orders, played about an hour of online multiplayer matches, finished roughly half of the challenges
The time is nigh. It’s like E3, a new Zelda launch, a new Elder Scrolls launch, your birthday, Christmas, and Veteran’s Day all rolled into one. This generation’s full-out console Smash Bros. is upon us and what else can Nintendo gamers do but dust off their Wii Us, take Bayonetta out, and then never play another game except Smash Bros. again until the next one that you play with gloves plugged into your mind comes out in 2020? Does the Wii U incarnation of Smash Bros. live up to the raucous hype and the thousands of hours people spent on NeoGAF arguing if Ridley was too big to be playable or not (hint: yes, he is)? Read on to find out if the next Smash really is our Bro or not.
Fill disclosure: Smash Bros. is my absolute favourite game series of all time. Receiving the Wii U version with a Mario amiibo figure two weeks early to play for this review is basically the greatest thing that may ever happen in my life. I’ve accepted that with no regrets. Anyways, on to the game. What is it like? In a word: great.
It’s hard to articulate just how great it is to see Smash Bros. running at full 1080p and 60fps on a nice big HDTV. To quote a Foreigner song ? “It feels like the first time. Feels like the very first time.” All of the previous Smash Bros. games were excellent in their times, and arguably will remain excellent throughout time, but the sad fact remains that if you try to run any of them legitimately on your 60″ LED TV you might as well just be staring at the potato drawer in the fridge. At least the potatoes have more pixels. Everything constantly looks glorious in Smash Bros. for Wii U. You could bemoan the fact that they decided to go away from the slightly more photorealistic style of Smash Bros. Brawl, but the fact remains that once you see it in motion it’s hard to go back to the old games in the same way.
The sound is also quite good in this Smash, but it’s honestly not quite the revolution that the music was in Brawl. An impressive number of gaming’s top composers got together yet again to do remixes and re-imaginings of their classic compositions, but the scale, depth, and quality still unfortunately fall shy of the platinum standard set by Brawl.
Content-wise this new Smash is also no slouch. All of the classic modes and side games from the past (minus poor Subspace Emissary) return with added co-op capabilities and a bunch of new modes have been added too. One glaring omission at the moment, which is meant to be fixed in a post-release patch, is tournament mode, which I spent the better part of 15 minutes trying to locate in the game’s menus before deciding (incorrectly) that it might need to be unlocked for some reason. New to the game are the often confusing board game-like Smash Tour, the amazingly hectic 8 Player Smash, Event Mode where you complete certain challenges as certain characters and Special Orders where you do mini-challenges for either Master Hand or Crazy hand for various rewards. Even though the character number is the same as on the inferior 3DS version, there are 46 mostly new stages to play on to keep you busy. It may feel a little light at the moment, but more stages are more likely than not on their way as post-release DLC including the already announce Miiverse stage featuring users’ drawings floating in the background, not to mention the potential for many a custom stage with the GamePad-centred stage builder. It’s worthy of note that unlocking stages isn’t as easy on the Wii U as it was on the 3DS version of the game. There are more difficult challenges that have to be completed like getting a single kill in Cruel Smash and destroying 100 blocks in Trophy Rush as Game & Watch to unlock stages on the Wii U version instead of just playing so many matches with certain characters and the like.
In Smash Tour four characters represented by Miis merrily move around a game board using all kinds of items and basically try to gather buffs and pick up playable characters to use in the final battle. Each character you collect basically gives you a stock in the final match during which you play as that character. There are also little mini-matches that occur occasionally after rounds with special catches like having a lot of exploding items or needing to fight a stage boss like the Mega Man stage’s Yellow Devil. If you die during one of these mini-matches you lose the character you were playing as and they go back on the board to be picked up again.
The 5-8 Player Smash takes place on a restricted selection of stages, but many can still feel very crowded when there are 8 characters on the go. This is easily my favourite new mode addition of the bunch and other modes like Classic Mode (particularly in co-op) and the Event mode draw heavily from this mode using it for larger battles or for allowing additional characters to be spawned at certain points.
Special Orders work differently depending upon if you play Master Orders or Crazy Orders. Master Orders are one-offs and you get your rewards immediately after finishing them. Crazy Orders invites you to try to do as many as you can on one stock and then try to take on Crazy Hand himself to claim your pool of prizes. While completing Events and the like you also often get Master Orders or Crazy Orders tickets that allow you to play them without having to front-up coins for the privilege.
With so many control options including the excellent, excellent GameCube controller adapter, no one ever has any right to complain about the controls in this game.
Online multiplayer worked similarly to how it worked on the 3DS for me. It’s working quite good right now, but it remains to be seen whether it will be able to hold up well when people around the globe are playing on it with varying connection speeds and qualities.
With additional content like the upcoming Miiverse stage and MEWTWO: KING OF POKEMANS (who you get for free if you have the now entirely irrelevant and inferior Smash Bros 3DS and the Wii U version — plus a free physical soundtrack CD collection), there’s always room to hope for the return of a favourite stage or the dearly departed Ice Climbers.
Included with the game for us was a Mario amiibo figure to try out the functionality of Nintendo’s Skylanders-like toy line that launched with the game. While pictures from across the web seem to confirm that the mould quality for a lot of the figures is less than acceptable, the Mario figure we received was quite well made and good-looking. Once the amiibo update for the Wii U went live I tried registering the amiibo through the Wii U settings menu first. While it appeared to work, whatever setup I did didn’t seem to apply in-game in Smash. When I tried to add my amiibo (affectionately named Mariibo because you have to name them) to a Smash match it was all like “hold your horses, go and set it up in the in-game amiibo menu before throwing it into battle”. So, I went and set it up again in the other menu (which seemed to stick that time) and ran into a conundrum with the “feeding” your amiibo your collected custom equipment. I thought that feeding the equipment to them just meant that you couldn’t feed that specific item to them again, but it seems like the item is completely deleted once you “feed” it to your amiibo. I’m not 100% sure this is the case because I had so many items it was hard to tell (and only certain ones show up for certain characters, so it’s hard to see a comprehensive list of your stock), but definitely be wary of feeding your best items to your amiibo unless you’re prepared to never see them again.
Physically using the amiibo couldn’t be more simple. A short tap on the GamePad will put it into battle at the character select screen, and it’s only a matter of holding the amiibo on the GamePad for around 4 seconds after you’re done playing and exiting out of the mode to save the data back on the figure.
I levelled Mariibo up to around level 20 (out of a possible 50) and you could already tell that he was learning tactics in a way that a standard CPU just doesn’t. I’m not sure I’d want to take on a Level 50 amiibo too often because I’m pretty sure that’s a battle that not many would walk away from unscathed.
Overall, Smash Bros. for Wii U is not without its faults. A decent amount of content like tournament mode, the Miiverse stage, and Mewtwo just didn’t make launch, but it is also nice to know that the game is going to have at least some substantial DLC out post-launch. While the sound portion of the game could have been treated with more Brawl-like gusto, the presentation and gameplay are still peerless and every bit as good as Smash Bros. has ever been, with the potential to only get better now that Nintendo’s finally joined the era of regular post-launch patches. Though we can only hope that the very first patch they put out adds the “SUUPER SMASH BROOOOOTHHHHERS!!!” announcer back to the otherwise eerily quiet title screen.
[taq_review]
A copy of the game and an amiibo figure were provided to us by the game’s publisher.