Super Mario Party Jamboree was an impressive return to form for the Nintendo digital board game/minigame multiplayer mania series. After years of pointless experiments and some uninspired maps and minigame collections, the creative energy that went into Jamboree, combined with some fun side-distractions, help get it back to the top of the multiplayer rotation.
Related reading: Our review of the base Mario Party Jamboree. It’s a very good game, we swear.
Now Nintendo’s back with a Switch 2 expansion pack that layers some Switch 2 features over the top of the base game. Without a doubt, Jamboree TV adds a lot of new content. Unfortunately, it does so in such a lazy way.
All this new content gets thrown into Jamboree TV mode, selectable from the main menu, with Mario Party Jamboree being another option. Within Jamboree TV mode, there are more than a dozen new mouse-driven minigames, as well as some entertaining ways to shake up the base game. The best of these is the fastplay mode, which reduces the number of turns to five, and then gives you a big pile of money and starting item to help you out. This mode adds a frantic quality to the base action and means a game can be over in 30 minutes or so, which is perfect for anyone who finds it increasingly difficult to sit down to a single game for hours at a time.
Meanwhile, there are other modes within Jamboree TV that are only passingly fun, but a good way to show off the Switch 2’s new tricks. There’s a coaster mode, which is cooperative and basically works like an on-rails shooter, and a “Bowser Live” mode, which makes use of the Switch 2’s microphone and camera to give you some controller-free minigames. These play options do a decent enough job of exploring the Switch 2’s hardware features, though ultimately you’ll find yourself returning to the more traditional Mario Party bits soon enough.
Meanwhile, there’s a whole lot of stuff in the base Jamboree mode that ISN’T in Jamboree TV, for some reason. Like Pro Mode, which was a great feature for the more serious board game enthusiast, as it removed a lot of randomisation from the game and therefore made it more strategic. You can’t play that mode with the Jamboree TV stuff. Unlocks are also not shared between the two different modes. Heck, resolution isn’t even shared, with the base game remaining locked to Switch 1 resolution, while Jamboree TV has a bump when playing in docked mode.
And Nintendo couldn’t even be bothered to add one additional map to the mix for returning players. The main part of the game – the bit you’ll be spending most of your time with once the novelty of the gimmicks has worn off, is totally unchanged. So, overall, though Jamboree TV does have a load of raw content and what’s there is good, this really does come across as very lazy where it counts. The lack of integration between them is decidedly un-Nintendo-like, feeling like the new material was bolted on without too much thought or consideration.
With all of that said, I haven’t even got to the most galling part of it all: Jamboree TV does not support GameShare online. It’s there as a local option, but to play online everyone has to have their own copy of the game. Nintendo was able to give people the ability to GameShare with Clubhouse Games, Donkey Kong Bananza, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S, and support LOCAL GameShare with Jamboree, but not online. The cynic in me assumes that this was specifically to force all Switch owners into making the upgrade for a game where 90% of the experience is locked up in playing multiplayer with friends. I’m disappointed in this because GameShare is never going to work as a feature if even Nintendo plays games over which games offer it and which don’t.
All of this leaves me in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, Mario Party Jamboree is the best thing that has happened to my favourite Nintendo multiplayer properties. On the other hand, this… this was just not Nintendo’s finest hour. A clunky mess of a package that seems not to have been thought through, coupled with an infuriating limitation on online play really lets it down. Also, when you think about it, most of the really good stuff was in the Switch original, and while Jamboree TV adds more, it doesn’t add anything that tops what we already have. Overall, the disappointment of the Switch 2 launch window, despite being essential if you haven’t played it before.
