More of a rant, but here we go:
This game is an utter disappointment to a Mario Golf Veteran who's played every game in the series (even the obscure Mobile Golf) that made me want to rant so hard to make a game review for this.
The story mode might as well not exist. While it DOES have more variety than Mario Golf: World Tour castle club, the plot has no cohesion. The first 30% of the game does give strong first impressions. You start out with (a rather fabulous) intro cutscene where Mario wins another tournament and you are a new Rookie Mii wanting to be a champion, which is the entire plot of the Mario Golf Gameboy games. You even gain exp and level your skills too. Cool! You then play a full 18 hole stroke-play tournament (with minor Speed Golf rules) at Bonnie Greens, which is how the bulk of the Mario Golf RPGs went too...
... Except that's the ONLY TOURNAMENT IN THE WHOLE DAMN GAME. Each new course has different requirements to proceed to the next one. Ridgerock lake has a cool Cross Country Golf idea where you play the ENTIRE course at once and have to sink any of the designated holes at your leisure. Great idea, but this course is pretty TOUGH for a game designed for "baby's first golf game" where I feel 90% of golf newcomers will rage quit at this mode alone. But after this... the story then derails into a DIFFERENT direction of how there are natural disasters happening at each course, and it completely forgoes the "Become the Golf Champion idea". The rest of the game is tied to beating arbitrary bosses, up through Bowser's Highlands! After you beat the Bowser's Highland boss? In about 5 hours, the story is over. No final tournament. You don't even play all 18 holes of Bowser's Highlands. The end...
...THAT'S IT?! Yep. No replayability to the story. You can't even play regular tournaments in Golf Adventure if you return to it, which even World Tour's Castle Club let you do... Well you can't even play ANY tournaments period because the game doesn't have this functionality (yet if DLC is a thing). This is a BASE STANDARD FOR ANY GOLF GAME PERIOD. Absolutely none of the other more traditional golf-based modes from past Mario Golf games (Ring Shot, Club Slots, Coin Shoot, 2 vs 2 doubles, even a damn training mode) are back asides from Skins. World Tour even took replayability a step further with bi-weekly online tournaments that gave you something to partake in. But in Super Rush, after the story... you have no reason to keep on playing unless you like to grind Mii levels or points to unlock Star Characters. And you don't even get Mii exp outside of Golf Adventure.
Oh and... online is terrible as well. The game has ZERO matchmaking, which even the barebones Mario Tennis Aces on release did! Everything has to be done in public rooms, like Smash Ultimate's Battle Arena. Good on paper, but there's gotta be more than 20 filters you can set which would spread an already rather niche genre's audience even thinner. Seeing stuff like this in other releases (GRID 2019 comes to mind), online will be dead in a month unless you pre-arrange in a Discord chatroom or something. However, I can say the most fun I've had with this game is Standard Play online rooms, as I've had close games with other random players of similar skill levels.
Not to mention... this game has ALMOST NO CHARM outside of the intro cutscene:
- Characters? Asides from the golf outfits for some characters (Boo should at least have a visor like they do in Tennis Aces), the
character post-hole animations are very minimal compared to the
hilariously over the top reactions in Toadstool Tour and World
Tour where for a Double Bogey you'd have a boulder actually flatten
Wario, or Bowser throwing a rage fit and 4th-wall punch-break the
camera.
- Courses? Gutted as well. These are visually the blandest looking courses in the entire series (just look at World Tour), and each hole
doesn't visually alter too much (just look at Toadstool Tour). Not to
mention, the existence of Speed Golf kills course creativity. This
means all courses have to be much wider without much crazy terrain
we've seen in past games. Gameplay-wise though, I did find Ridgerock Lake and Balmy Dunes to be great technical courses before the gimmicks start piling in on Wellweather Woods / Bowser Highlands.
Oh and... even the controls are fundamentally changed from the past Mario Golf games. The older games in the franchise were built off a 3-click scheme. You press a button once to start a swing, then you press a button to set power, and then you press once more for an impact "accuracy" check to see if the ball goes as planned. You had to both plan and execute your shot! Super Rush entirely omits the 3rd accuracy press, and accuracy is RNG determined! This is the same with Auto "Easy Mode" swings in Toadstool Tour, but now you're forced with this control style. The amount of RNG spread does depend on your ball lie (i.e. shooting from the bunker vs fairway) and is okay in practice, but I still prefer when I had control of nearly every aspect of the swing in past games. Super Rush does have an advanced spin system where you can even make the ball unrealistically snake in mid-air.
My nitpicks don't end here. There are no alternate camera angles that zoom in more closely on where your ball lands, and you for the most part can't view the green terrain changes much when you're doing an approach shot. Also a minor nitpick detail that DOES bother me... the Mii's voice. World Tour Mii voice clips are taken directly from Mario Kart Wii, and the same voices match up depending on your Mii's shirt color. This is NOT true with Super Rush where they mismatched the Mii's voice from Mario Kart 8. This is the highest-pitched my Mii has ever sounded. It's just the lack of attention to details like this along with the no charm part which makes the game feel even more unpolished to me.
In the end, Mario Golf: Super Rush is a by the numbers sequel that pampers too much to the casual audience while making this game simultaneously a "baby's first golf" and "not-golf (Speed / Battle Golf), while failing to even be the bare minimum of a full-featured golf game. Maybe DLC will fix the issues, but the initial presentation has already soured my opinion on the game.
My advice: Unless you plan on playing this game in a casual setting like Mario Party, honestly just pick up any prior Mario Golf to this point. Even the non-Mario We Love Golf! (Wii), developed by the same Camelot, is more of a Mario Golf game than this. If you want to try a more RPG take on Golf, look into Golf Story too.
More personal rant: This game has made me have no confidence in pre-ordering games anymore unless it's something that I'm sure to 110% enjoy like Smash Bros, Mario Kart, or Forza Horizon. I even had tempered expectations for this release, and this game went below that. It even holds my title for most regretful game purchase even over "The Crew 2" and "GRID 2019" for me.
Sad to say because of the Switch Install-base, I feel like this will be the best-selling game in the franchise. A lot of people will disagree with me, to the point, it feels like the same situation in the Paper Mario franchise where I have to defend why I think Paper Mario 64 and the Thousand-Year Door are objectively better games in nearly every way (in my opinion) when most people only have played The Origami King.
