10/10.
This game is excellent! It's the perfect Mario Party experience for a handheld. A ton of unlockables and fun await you inside this game.
It's your usual Mario Party game: you roll the Dice Block, move around the board collecting coins and purchasing Stars to increase your chances of victory. The minigames are one of the best aspects of this game, and they're all diverse as well: 4-Player Minigames, 2 vs. 2 Minigames, 1 vs. 3 Minigames and Battle Minigames (where you wager coins and whoever wins gets the most coins).
This game has five boards in total, all with different mechanics implementing the same Mario Party formula. The boards consist of: Wiggler's Garden, Toadette's Music Room, DK's Stone Statue, Kamek's Library and Bowser's Pinball Machine. You'll never find an end to the fun and you'll find yourself coming back to these boards for even more Star-hunting.
What's surprising about Mario Party DS is the Story Mode, however, as it is in this mode where you will unlock a majority of the unlockables. In fact, this is the mode where you unlock Bowser's Pinball Machine. But anyways, the story revolves that Bowser shrunk everyone down using the Minimizer. It's a solid story overall. This aren't all of the details in this particular Story Mode. I'm keeping it short and sweet so we can move onwards to Minigame Mode, and you can discover everything else in Story Mode once you play the game.
Now, for Minigame Mode, this is where you play game modes revolving all around Minigames. This is also where Free Play is. This mode, as usual, let's you play every Minigame that you've unlockable. Yes, you heard that right. You have to unlock a majority of the Minigames by playing either Party Mode or Story Mode. Other than a few luck-based minigames, a lot of them are really fun and entertaining!
Regarding Minigame game modes, there's a lot of variety here. There's Step it Up, Battle Cup, Score Scuffle, Boss Bash and Rocket Rascals. You'll have a blast with these modes.
To close up this review, there's Gallery. All of your unlockables can be found here. By collecting MP Points (Mario Party Points) as you play through the game, you'll unlock Character Figures, Boss Trophies, Board Features and Badges. These are unlocked by either playing Story Mode with an specific character or by just racking up MP Points. You can also view story sequences, view your scores in minigames and various game modes, listen to the game's magnificent soundtrack and view which Minigames are in which set.
To wrap up this review, this is a very solid Mario Party game. You'll have a hard time putting this one down. Absolutely recommended if you still don't own it yet. Go out there and boy, buy this game if you haven't already!