Mario Strikers: Battle League Needs To Be Gritty And Nasty

thegamer.com:

Mario Strikers: Battle League was easily the best reveal of the recent Nintendo Direct for me. A lot of the games seemed baked in a sense of nostalgia, designed to appeal to our inner child. 'No way, Gleep Glup is back!' and so forth. Mario Strikers, the second nostalgic sports title revealed at the Direct (after Switch Sports), was that for me. Football is the best sport in the world, and Strikers is easily Mario's best sports title. Golf, Tennis, and Sluggers are all good, but none of them have the charm of Strikers, and in some ways it's a surprise that it's taken so long for it to come to the Switch.

Golf and Tennis do lend themselves more to the motion elements of the Switch, I suppose, but then by that criteria, so does Sluggers - plus, the Switch is not as motion centric as the Wii anyway. That's part of the reason Switch Sports looks so uninspiring to me. Especially the football mode, which appears to be a weird Rocket League without cars game that vaguely resembles football but is, in fact, not football. Mario Strikers is not true football either - Allan Saint-Maximin can do a lot of things, but I'm yet to see him pick up the ball and breathe fire on it - but it understands the rush that makes football great and applies typical arcade conventions to it. Football is not just a backdrop to Strikers, it's a game that is soaked in football. Each crunching tackle, each bicycle kick, each jockey for space, it screams football. Real football.

Related: In Defence of 1-2 Switch, Nintendo’s Most Maligned Game

There are a lot of great football games out there. FIFA has been consistently top of the league, and Pro Evo used to put up a good fight before falling on hard times and thoroughly embarrassing itself with eFootball.