Samuel Coe – Google

To be clear: Mario 3D World is great fun. I owned it on the Wii U and it was one of my favourite games for the system. This review is about Bowser’s Fury (I downloaded this dual package as it was the only way to play that game). I’ve tried to get into it on and off for a few years and I just don’t find it interesting or engaging. For a sandbox title it just doesn’t have the polish or fun of Odyssey/Sunshine/Mario 64. I did not expect it to be as long as those games but I did expect the same standard of Nintendo polish which just isn’t present. This seems like a cheap attempt to get people who already bought 3D World to download the game again.

I loved the first game and was so charged for this. The good: I really like the new movement, star power ups & enemy strengths/weaknesses. It’s an addictive game with a lot of replay value (it has “sandbox style” side missions in different worlds like Mario Odyssey). The bad: A lot of glitches, it wasn’t unusual for the game to freeze midway through a battle & I’d have to start again I’m sure they’ll fix with updates. The biggest complaint was that it was way too easy for me (even on the hardest setting) if you played as the female characters. They were made way too strong, especially Rosalina Rabbid who could stop enemies and bosses moving for 2 turns! (Also with a simple dash). I ended up not using the female characters as it was too boring otherwise. There weren’t as many bosses as the prequel either.

In 2006/2007 it was a 4* show but it got worse and worse after that. When the relaunch first happened, there was a relatively competent roster, ECW originals and a strong emphasis on hardcore wrestling/toilet humour/soft porn. From around 2008 it just became another PG WWE show but with much worse wrestlers (in fact any ECW wrestler who showed promise like CM Punk and Jack Swagger were subsequently “promoted” to Raw/SmackDown!) The roster became WWE rejects the company didn’t know what to do with it young talent who weren’t quite ready for the big time yet. If it advertised and branded itself as a developmental program (I.e. NXT) then people would’ve remembered it more fondly but it simply wasn’t ECW so using that brand felt very insincere.

I bought this game on the original Xbox in 2003 and I was thoroughly disappointed at the time; I didn’t feel like it was a ‘real’ Doom game and ended up just playing the old Doom’s after a few hours of game time on Doom 3. It felt like they had made it unnecessarily complicated with items like the PDA/email/story telling and there was less emphasis on just “running and gunning”. For the last 15 years I’ve been saying Doom 3 sucked but after downloading and completing the original Doom games for the Switch, I decided to give it another chance 15 years later. I’m so glad to say that I WAS WRONG! I think the game is absolutely brilliant and the graphics/mechanics still hold up well today. I now really appreciate the PDA mechanics and think it’s clever. The emphasis is ‘scaring with tension’ (dark lighting/suspenseful music & sounds etc) which I really get now; it’s not the same fast paced game like the original Dooms & Doom 2016 but I really appreciate it. 100% give it another chance if you didn’t get on with it in childhood. A great game.