A light, breezy abduction chase sends a plumber and his sentient hat across a string of self-contained kingdoms, each with its own tone: a desert with a sunken-ice twist, a lake dome, a mechanical garden, a realistic city, an extinct-volcano kitchen and a Japanese-style castle. The framework exists less as plot than as connective tissue between Kingdoms, and the design knows it. Environmental gags and callbacks reward long-time followers of the series, from a courtyard painted in the style of an earlier era to arcade references tucked into the realistic city. Visually the game still looks vibrant and distinctly Mario despite its age. The whole package radiates confidence in what a collectathon platformer can be.
Capture is the centrepiece. Possessing a T-Rex, a frog, a tank, a Zipper or an octopus serves as both traversal engine and puzzle language, and no other 3D Mario hands the player a possession sandbox of this scale. Enemies, plants and objects across every kingdom open themselves to capture, each with distinct movement and abilities that recontextualise familiar spaces. The mechanic never wears thin because the kingdoms keep finding new hosts for it. Few systems in the series’ history do this much work while staying this legible.
Kingdom design sustains the invention. Flat 2D pipe sections compress the platforming into pure classic form, while orientation-shifting 2D levels rotate the world around the character, an idea that dazzles in concept but produces queasy discomfort in execution. Inverted pyramids, hidden interiors and the New Donk City festival set-piece, capped by the festival song that lodges in the head for days, give the mid-game its emotional peak. The soundtrack deserves particular credit: the festival track alone elevates its whole kingdom sequence into one of the series’ best moments.
Controls are tight and responsive, with the movement engine tuned so well that even basic jumps feel expressive. The one caveat is motion: certain moons and races require shaking the pad, and there is no button substitute for those specific challenges. HD-rumble dig-for-buried-moons hunts fare worse, a gimmick that never communicates what the vibration is supposed to mean and turns discovery into guesswork. Both are small blemishes on an otherwise superb-feeling game.
The 880-moon economy treats a full clear as roughly two playthroughs’ worth of content. Beating the credits opens moon rocks and roughly half the total collection, making the post-game genuinely meaty rather than a token epilogue: rematch pipes, hint-art hunts, moon rocks and an achievement board give the tail real structure. Wandering design occasionally works against pacing, with coins hiding where power moons appear to be, and a handful of minigame moons (the desert trace-walk, fishing, the seaside volleyball with its hundred-bounce demand) drag more than they reward.
The Darker Side gauntlet is the campaign’s most sadistic stretch. A checkpoint-free challenge level that fails into a completely different area, demanding hundreds of attempts, pushes past difficulty into tedium; one checkpoint per section would have fixed it entirely. The Wooded Kingdom rolling moon earns similar criticism as a punishing rather than clever challenge. Toadette’s achievement-moon payout loop, with its endless unskippable dialogue animation, grinds the late completion push to a crawl.
Three smaller oddities round out the picture. The most expensive cosmetic outfits cost 10,000 coins each with no practical benefit and no good grinding method. The Japanese-castle kingdom aesthetic never quite reconciles with its occupant. And a balloon-photo side mode sits behind a paid online subscription, locking out content that needed no such gate. None threatens the core; all irritate at the margins.
Overall, this is a joyful and endlessly inventive 3D Mario whose capture sandbox, kingdom variety, festival set-piece and substantial post-game outweigh its forced motion controls, rumble-gimmick hunts and a checkpoint-free final gauntlet that mistakes tedium for difficulty. Beating the credits merely unlocks half the journey, and almost every step of the rest is worth taking. The series’ most creative entry in decades.
