I haven’t found a kitchen sink in the new Switch 2 upgrade of Super Mario Bros. Wonder yet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Nintendo has carpet-bombed this expansion with features: 23 multiplayer minigames (both local and online), a new powerup, new game modifiers, two new playable characters, enhanced visuals, an assist mode, seven new boss battles, and a big new collectathon with its own currency and unlock systems.
And oh, I almost forgot — or rather, Nintendo almost did, because this wasn’t featured heavily in its marketing materials for the expansion — a new challenge mode featuring 74 remixed courses from the original game. 74!
This mode is called Toad Brigade Training Camp, and it’s brilliant. It’s worth highlighting upfront for players who already own the game, aren’t interested in multiplayer, and contemplating whether the upgrade is worth it. Toad Brigade Training Camp isn’t quite as substantial as it sounds, but it’s a solid few hours of pell-mell platforming challenge staged within one of the most inventive and refined 2D platform games you can find.
Toad Brigade Training Camp is representative of this release as a whole. (I’ve put off referring to it by name until the fourth paragraph because it’s called, deep breath: Super Mario Bros. Wonder — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup at Bellabel Park. From here on I’ll just call it Bellabel Park.) This is a scattershot expansion with a dozen different ideas, all of them playful and delightfully well executed, but many of them kind of disposable.
It’s busy and noisy; as a returning player, it’s odd to fire up a Nintendo game and have a similar experience to logging into a live-service game like Destiny 2 after a year or more away and being overwhelmed. What is all this stuff? Why do I have yet more currencies to track? But none of this matters too much because the game it’s all built from and appended to is an absolute banger.
