Bowser’s Fury is a small and somewhat half-baked but fun take on the 3D Mario formula that offers one big, open-ended level separated into a few differently-themed islands. I really like every 3D Mario game from Galaxy onward, and can at least appreciate the prior ones. This game’s general gameplay hits some of the same notes, so I’ll just focus in this review on what this game tried to add on to that format.

Grabbing certain amounts of “shines” in this game unlocks a few boss encounters that slowly unveil more of the map. The islands also gain more to do over time as you clear them out. The structure is fine but the “open-world”-ness of it feels pointless when the islands are basically separate levels, other than a few moments where you may find an unexpected way to get from one spot to another. I don’t think this adds anything over the structure of past Mario games. Frankly, I would not mind to go back to selecting stuff from a menu over this, or at least make it more dense and actually connected like an Odyssey level.

The game’s most noticeable gimmick is a giant Bowser that occasionally interrupts play until a shine is collected or he gets bored. While this makes the game more conceptually novel and dynamic, it doesn’t really add any actual fun. I found 9/10 times that he was more of a nuisance who would show up a few seconds before I was about to grab a shine anyway. Boss encounters with him have a large scale, but feel quite clunky and otherwise generally feel like the same kind of boss fight you see in any Mario game. The sluggish camera controls in these feel particularly bad. You could do this as a setpiece once, but not make a whole game around it.

The presentation of this on the whole feels a bit rushed, mostly in terms of how story/tutorials/etc. are dished out, so you can definitely tell it’s not a full big game. I can’t fully hold this against the game itself, but the 30fps-ish framerate in handheld mode feels kinda bleh, and when docked everything looks really jagged and grainy at times on a big modern display, too. I hope there’s a big hardware upgrade before the next actual full Mario game comes out.

These complaints are definitely not to say that this is a bad game, because I actually think it’s pretty fun, just like any other modern 3D Mario title. But I just do not see this as a huge amazing new direction for the series or the amazing top-tier title that some have described it as. It’s just like a fun new big Mario level, which is cool in my book, but not better or more novel than any part of Odyssey.