Mario has had a long and diverse career as a plumber and part-time hero. He has learnt to play soccer, tennis and football. He has visited kingdoms, parallel dimensions, the pages of books and even space. There are however two places he hasn’t visited: the world of Apples and the world of Androids. Now that he is finally taking a visit to those worlds let’s go and check in on our dear plumber.

Graphics & Sound:

The graphics are bright and colourful. They seem to be ripped straight from Mario’s 2D adventures over the last 10 years. Anyone coming into this from another Mario game will easily be able to tell everything apart. The worlds are colourful while being easy to differentiate, not a single one, even the gloomy ones feel the same.

The main characters and NPCs have simple animations but they are done well along with the pickups who spin, bounce, fall or just glide across the levels. I doubt any of these were created or animated specifically for this game but it shows how timeless good animation and a proper use of colours can be. A final touch in the graphics is these little stickers that pop up when you knock out an enemy, capture a flag or even die. They look good and seem to be out of Paper Mario.

The menu has a nice score which is pleasant and doesn’t try too hard. The in-level background music is a bunch of rotating tracks and while each of them could get annoying if they were doing this alone the sheer amount of them makes sure you never notice them repeating.

The full game has sound effects for each thing. Mario shouts “Here we go!” the second the game loads. There are little clings and clangs for every touch, there are sounds of cheer for the competitive mode and there are sounds for each enemy you jump on. Even the buildings and people (toads) that you can tap on make a noise. Again, all of it was not made for this but it is nice that they went and grabbed everything for the game.

Gameplay:

Nintendo has always specialized in the easy to pick up, difficult to master gameplay and Super Mario Run is no different. The game isn’t awkward to play since you hold your phone in portrait mode and the only button is the screen. Mario is always running so you tap the screen to jump, hold it to jump higher and tap it in the air to slow down your fall. Yep, that’s all the controls making Super Mario Run easy to pick up.

On the difficult to master side of the table is how using those jumps vary. While running Mario automatically vaults over enemies, this leaves them unharmed but if you tap as he is vaulting you stomp on them causing goombas to be crushed and turtles to be tossed while giving Mario a higher jump. If you tap while touching a wall Mario will flip off the wall. Using all these little things while timing jumps and landings is what makes the learning curve fun.

Super Mario Run feels like any other Mario game if your arrow keys were stuck. Mario always runs. All the standards of a typical Mario game are present. These are the blocks that have pickups inside them, bricks to break through, goombas, turtles, piranha plants, mushrooms and stars are all present and accounted for. The only one to make a difference from most Mario games is the star which still kills enemies on touch but also acts as a coin magnet. There are three modes in Mario Run:

Tour: Which is your standard Mario game
Remix 10: Same as the above but there are 10 levels shorter levels to cross at a time
Rally: Which is an asynchronous run against another player to see who can rack up more fans by collecting coins and defeating enemies in a set time.

These give you something more to do since the game was designed as a pure time waster and it’s fun to play these levels while doing the side quest of collecting rare coins in each level. While the gameplay is not game-changing it is nice to see a well thought out game on Android after tons of poorly built cash grabs.

Conclusion:

Yes, I do recommend Super Mario Run but I want to point out I’m taking a point away from it for one reason and one reason alone: ALWAYS ONLINE! It’s not like Tour or Remix 10 needs an online connection but you can’t even get to the menu if you don’t have WiFi or mobile data. The game will even fail if your mobile data is weak and we all know how great Indian Internet is. If you are in a country with competent Internet providers, add a point to the final score below.