Review: Mario Strikers Battle League is a multiplayer marvel, but solo play is shallow

videogameschronicle.com:

From a gameplay perspective, Mario Strikers: Battle League is so consistently fun that we just wish there was a bit more to do with it as a single player.

While the online offering is fun, and the 8-player couch co-op is going to make for some amazing nights in (as long as you’ve accumulated an army of joy-cons), if you’re picking the game up to play it alone you may be shocked at how quickly you’re finished with the game’s solo content. 

The only single-player offerings, outside of playing one-off games against the AI, are the various tournaments in the game. In each of these tournaments, you’ll play against teams that specialise in a particular theme, be that teams that are fast, good at passing, or strong. 

However, each of these tournaments is only three games long and can be completed in around 15 minutes, so we found ourselves finishing all of them in an afternoon, after which there’s very little replayability.

The AI is incredibly simple, and there’s no way to increase the difficulty until later in the game. The AI is very easily tricked, and can’t keep up with any type of fast dribbling. The gear system feels irrelevant because every character feels like they can do just about everything as well as each other. 

We managed to get through multiple tournaments by simply hitting perfectly timed shots from the halfway line. If they didn’t go in, our teammate would be right at the box for a tap-in.

The keepers are incredible at stopping the first shot, but they’re useless when it comes to actually holding the ball, so we ended up winning matches by 7 or 8 goals, most of which were our strikers sliding in to tidy up after Bowser’s howitzer of a shot was palmed away by the keeper. 

There’s a problem in Mario Strikers: Battle